Rio Tinto Summer Internships 2013

So my time here is almost over and I will leave Cape Town tomorrow. I really can’t quite believe it. I have been here for 9 weeks now and it really feels like yesterday that I arrived (pardon the cliché)!

I will keep this blog short as I don’t want to bore people anymore, but as I am sure you can tell I have had a fantastic time in this amazing country that is full of such diversity everywhere you look. I would recommend a visit to this city to anyone, there is so much to do in the city as well as in the surrounding areas.

I have spent a lot of time in the city but also went for a 3 day safari near to Port Elizabeth at Shamwari Game Reserve, saw whales and great white sharks in Hermanus and went on a UCT geology field trip as well as another weekend trip to the West Coast.

The 50 page project is now finished and my research project at UCT is over! I have learnt a huge amount and found it very interesting. The work will now be continued by a couple of fourth year Chemical Engineering students as part of their Masters project for this year and there is also significant scope for much more work in this area of research. I would be very interested to know some of the results of further studies so I hope to keep in touch with the department in the future.

In addition to thanking everyone at Rio Tinto and Imperial College who made this internship possible, I would also like to thank all those at the Chemical Engineering Department at UCT for making me feel so welcome. Before Zoe and Alice left, a couple of weeks ago, we all went out for lunch at Rhodes Memorial above the campus, which was very enjoyable. (The photo below shows everyone who I have been working with in the Minerals to Metals Research Group).

I am sure none of them will get the chance to read this, but they have been incredibly accommodating and made the work enjoyable as well as ensuring that I have had an amazing experience, so thank you!

Anyway, my brief exposure to the world of blogging is over for now. I hope you have all enjoyed them – I have had 3690 views in total, which I am very surprised about!

Thank you for reading, cheers for the last time…

Harry

Read Time to say goodbye to Cape Town in full

It has been a long time since I talked extensively about the real reason I am in Cape Town. I have been at the University of Cape Town for 8 weeks now, with just one more week to go! It will be incredibly sad to leave as I have had an amazing time in this city and met lots of interesting and generous people at the university.

As I said at the start of my blogs, I am doing a research project looking at the effect of froth flotation on coal. This has been focused on two coal samples from coalfields in the North East of the country in areas called Waterberg and Witbank.

At the start of the project, a typical day was spent in the lab collecting data from froth flotation experiments or preparing samples for other analytical methods. Several chemical reagents were used during flotation and the dosages of these were varied to determine which was the most effective and how their individual chemistry interacted with each of the coal types. After each flotation, the liquid concentrate that is collected was dried and weighed, before being sent off for analysis to determine how much sulfur has been removed (the main aim of the project).

Over 120 samples were sent off to the Analytical Lab in the Chemical Engineering Department, as the analysis must be done using a particular machine that is only available in one of the labs. This took over three weeks to be completed (understandable for so many samples), but the results will now form a major part of the final project write-up, which has now reached over 40 pages in length!

As well as flotation experiments, the coal samples have been made into blocks that are observed under a reflected light microscope to determine the composition of each in terms of their sulfides (the acid-generating minerals causing the initial problem of acid rock drainage), the relative proportions of bright and dull coal (usefully, bright coal is less bright) and the amount of ash.

This type of work could potentially be very useful to the department’s research and to the mining industry as a whole, as a simple evaluation of the coal mineralogy could be linked to the success of flotation to remove sulfides. Therefore, this could save a significant amount of time and money for the industry, as flotation would only need to be implemented on the coal waste if a mineralogical study showed that it would be worthwhile.

This makes the work incredibly engaging as it contributes to a branch of science that is innovative and growing and is likely to help the mining industry in the future. At present, only 5-10% of South Africa’s mining industry (and 20% in the world) uses froth flotation to remove sulfides prior to waste disposal, but research in this field at UCT hopes to one day improve these figures.

Fingers crossed that all made sense! One more week to go of finishing the written report, a bit more microscope work and a some final analyses in the lab, before leaving this amazing country and being back in the UK (it better not be grey and raining!)

I hope that you enjoyed this instalment, and that is was a little different from my tourist blog of Cape Town thus far.

Cheers,

Harry

Read Working 9-5, what a way to make a living… in full