Column Flotation Champ; Minnovex Technologies President Glenn

First impressions can be everything, so Glenn Kosick, a miner processing engineer, sports a stylish business suit when he is promoting his company’s know-how to those who have never heard of him or Minnovex Technologies. While he is well-known to most mineral processing engineers in Canada for his professional dedication, Kosick, who is the son of a Cape Breton coal miner, has had to hustle in the past two years to make an impression on those who run Canada’s major milling facilities. To a large degree, he has succeeded by championing the radical froth flotation technique known as column flotation, a technology that was less fortunate in making a good first impression when it came on the scene in the early 1960s.

For most of the past two years, Kosick has competed with two other North American consultants that specialize in column flotation — Cominco Engineering Services and Control International. Their challenge has been to dispel the sometimes strong negative impressions column flotation has acquired as a result of some spectacular early failures at Brunswick Mining & Smelting in 1983 and at Nornada Minerals’ Geco copper-zinc-silver mine. In his gamble to acquire the largest share of the limited market, Kosick has two cards up his sleeve. The first is his own mill operating track record, developed over 14 years since graduating from the Cape Breton University College in 1976 and the faculty of engineering at Queen’s University in 1984. He worked for Lakefield Research for four years, a summer at Rio Tinto’s Rossing uranium mine in southwest Africa, two summers at Teck Corp.’s Highmont mine in British Columbia, and full-time at Cominco Ltd.’s Pine Point, Polaris and Con mines during the 1980s.

Another card in Kosick’s favor is research backing from Dr. Glenn Dobby, associate professor of metallurgy and material science at the University of Toronto. Dobby, who earned a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in 1984 under Dr. James Finch (a renowned froth flotation researcher at McGill University in Montreal), has written a book on column flotation (co-authored with Finch and published by Pergamon Press in February, 1990). McGill and the U of T are the leading centres of column flotation research in North America.

Dressed in tradesmen’s clothes, Kosick spent several all-nighters in the spring of 1989 in an Etobicoke, Ont., shop, learning a slew of practical hands-on trades from skilled tradesman and entrepreneur J.J. Downs. Plastic welding was a critical skill in getting Minnovex off the ground, Kosick says, “and J.J. was the only one I could find who could teach it to me.” As a young, upstart entrepreneur, Kosick made his first business deal in March, 1989 with Olga Matwijenko, superintendent of mill and process control development for Kidd Creek Mines in Timmins, Ont.

It was a fortunate set of circumstances. In the fall of 1989, Kidd was in the process of installing a 5-ft.-diameter column to study bubble generation and kinetics and to evaluate the feasibility of the technology. Meanwhile, Kosick needed his first customer in order to help finance a $150,000 portable pilot plant he planned to build. Pilot plant testwork could save Kidd a considerable amount of money designing a multi-column circuit for the cleaner portion of the company’s zinc circuit, and Kidd has a policy of soliciting researchers to develop new ideas. Kosick agreed to start testwork in Timmins in early June, so the two struck a deal. Contract in hand, Kosick then constructed the 3-column pilot plant himself.

That was the beginning of a hectic summer for Kosick. Equipped with three pilot-scale columns and a bank of mechanical cells, Minnovex could, with its portable pilot plant, evaluate a variety of circuit designs in about two weeks, all without affecting the normal operating schedule of a mill. The service appealed to a number of major companies, who, up to then, had typically evaluated column flotation based on a single column of their own construction, tested as a stand-alone unit. “This single-column method of testing restricts you to a limited number of configurations, leaving final designs up to an educated guess,” Dobby says. The 3-column pilot plant approach offered much more flexibility and scope for a better circuit design.

“The majors were not going to spend millions on an educated guess,” Dobby says. Adds Kosick: “The best place to do applied testing is not in the lab but out in the field, where you can allow for variables such as oxidized reagents and the constant adjusting of reagents by operators.” The advantages of a mobile pilot plant were so obvious that several contracts for pilot plant test work at mill sites all across the country followed. At Curragh Resources’ mine in Faro, Y.T., Kosick did some trouble-shooting without the need for pilot testing. His recommendations were implemented. Still, resistance to the technology from some of the majors, notably Noranda, remain.

“It’s ironic that the first installation was at Noranda’s Gaspe mine,” says Dobby, “yet the company did not run with it — perhaps because of the two less-than-successful applications at Brunswick and Geco.” Noranda may be coming around, though. The company is currently re-evaluating the technology by doing extensive testing at Matagami, Que.

Demand was so great that another portable flotation pilot plant was assembled by Minnovex and a third, stationary plant was erected at the research facilities of Ortech International in Mississauga, Ont. Kosick hired four engineers to handle the workload and Dobby supplied a graduate student to work on the Kidd Creek project. A long-time associate and friend of Kosick’s, Dale Coupland, joined the company in August, 1989. The results of their work are fat reports which client companies can evaluate financially before deciding on a particular circuit design.

Column technology can save companies considerable amounts of money by producing a higher grade of concentrate at a given recovery or a higher recovery at a given grade. Payback periods are typically about two years. “Although the technology may appear simple, it requires a lot of careful forethought before being implemented,” Kosick says. That forethought entails scrutiny. Failure to take a close enough look at the frothing characteristics of a particular ore, for example, is one possible reason for some of the early failures. Spargers, a device for creating air bubbles at the bottom of the column, is another reason for industry resistance to column flotation. To solve the problem of clogged spargers, Minnovex has come up with a radically new air sparger consisting of rectangular battons that do not clog and are easier to replace. A typical sparger requires three of these rectangular battons, compared with 10 or 15 of the conventional, cylindrical type. The Minnovex battons slide in and out of a stainless steel chamber on sliding racks.

Dobby, who has three years of operating experience of his own with Inco Ltd. in Sudbury, Ont., first met Kosick at the Canadian Mineral Processors (CMP) annual meeting in Ottawa in January, 1988. Kosick had presented a paper on the use of expert systems in column flotation (introduced at the Polaris mine) and Dobby had cornered him in the bar afterwards to talk about it. “Glenn is an extremely hard worker,” Dobby says. “I was amazed at what they had done up there, and Glenn was really pumped up on expert systems.”

It wasn’t long before the two men realized their compatibility. Kosick had had research experience at Lakefield Research and Dobby a couple of years operating experience at Inco, so they could appreciate each others’ point-of-view. Dobby, too, needed a practical outlet for some of the ideas he and his students at U of T were developing. “You can publish papers ’till your blue in the face,” he says, “but until someone uses your ideas, the process remains merely an academic one.”

When they saw each other again, the following year (1989), at the CMP meeting, Kosick had left Cominco after turning down the mill superintendency at the new Red Dog mine in Alaska (the only new plant in North America to use column flotation) and formed Minnovex after short stints running a maid service in Toronto with Coupland, and coming close to investing in a shrimp-farming venture in the Dominician Republic. “I was tired of the isolation of the Far North,” Kosick says. “And there was not a single redeeming factor in the maid service, so I decided to get back into a field I know something about.” In January, 1990, Kosick and Dobby became business partners.

For Dobby, Minnovex provided an ideal vehicle for transfering technology from his labs to the industry. The Kidd Creek job, for example, presented an opportunity to use a level-sensing technique devised in 1987-88 by Derk Dirsus, a bachelor of engineering student in his fourth year at U of T.

In his thesis, Dirsus outlined a process incorporating three differential pressure transmitters to detect the level of the froth in a column flotation cell. So Minnovex decided to use the method on its pilot plant. “We soon realized that there was a lot more information coming from the pressure cells than just froth levels,” Dobby says. “Using this method, we can analyse the process to death,” Kosick says. Fitting the control system to an expert system package, Minnovex has done considerable work developing a turn-key control package called Columnex, which is ideally suited for training operators of the new equipment. Every time the company sells a control package, it pays a royalty to Comdale Technology, supplier of the expert system shell.

Another example of intelligence being transferred to the industry by Minnovex are the procedures for scaling up a column flotation circuit from pilot plant to full-scale production. The first project to use the technique is a tailings reclamation project in Yellowknife, N.W.T., for Nerco’s Con mine where two columns, 50 ft. (15 metres) high, are being constructed. The circuit is being designed to float, selectively, gold-bearing arsenopyrite and barren pyrite. Structural work has been subcontracted to Fluor-Daniel-Wright.

To ensure that shifters, instrumentation personnel, engineers and maintenance people form a good first impression of the new technology once a company decides to switch, Minnovex also conducts seminars on the theory and practice of column flotation.

Though Minnovex is not well-known internationally, Kosick and Dobby are determined to become the best at what they do and stay that way. “We have a good product and a creative staff, so we won’t stagnate,” Dobby says. “I guarantee that.”