Parker Centre

Gravity Man returns

Associate Professor André Laplante from McGill University in Canada is certainly one of the most frequent overseas visitors, if not the most frequent overseas visitor, to the Parker Centre. And he has just been back for another visit, spending a month at the Centre (June 2005).

Professor Laplante is an internationally recognised expert in gravity methods for recovering gold from its ores.

His relationship with the Centre began in 1999 when he led a two-day Parker Centre workshop on gravity gold recovery. He subsequently joined the AMIRA P420B “Gold Processing Technology” project team when this project started in April 2001. He is also a member of the research team for the new AMIRA P420C “Gold Processing Technology" project which commenced in March 2005.

During his regular visits to the Centre, he has participated in surveys of gravity circuits at gold mines in Australia and Africa. He has also led four further gravity gold workshops, including one during his recent visit, which was held in Perth and at Gekko Systems in Ballarat, Victoria (June 2005 workshop brochure).

Professor André Laplante (centre) with the Parker Centre's Mr Greg Wardell Johnson (left) during a technology transfer visit to a gold mine in Ghana, West Africa in January 2005.

The gravity gold workshops are designed to provide practising metallurgists with the knowledge and tools to assist in circuit design, equipment selection and optimisation of gravity circuits. Recent advances and future developments are also discussed.

"The June workshops went well,” says Professor Laplante. “It’s a course that we’ve given a number of times but each time there is a small incremental improvement because we keep learning more and we try to pass on as much of that information as possible. And as a result of the work of the AMIRA P420B project, it has much more of an Australian flavour now, as well as having international examples because we do work all over the world.”

Professor Laplante also presented the gravity gold workshop in Iran in February 2005 and expects to present it in Capetown, South Africa in August 2006.

During his June visit, he took part in the first site visits for the gravity component of the new AMIRA P420C project – to three gold mines in the Kalgoorlie area in Western Australia. Professor Laplante and other team members did a gravity circuit survey with sampling at Kanowna Belle mine, made a pre-survey visit to St Ives mine which is building a new plant and also visited KCGM’s operation.

Professor Laplante's visits and collaboration with the Centre saw him appointed the inaugural Parker Centre Honorary Visiting Researcher during 2001/2002. The title of Honorary Visiting Researcher is bestowed on particular visitors in recognition of their outstanding and continuing contributions to the collaborative culture and research activities of the Centre.

Professor Laplante's appointment as a Parker Centre Honorary Visiting Researcher was renewed earlier this year for another three years. “That is both an honour and a pleasure, so I expect to be very much in the picture for the next three years,” he says.

He says his next visit to the Parker Centre is likely to be in May 2006: for research and other site surveys. “Site audits are the battlefield for the type of work involved in the Process Optimisation module of the AMIRA P420C project. You have to do some additional work in the laboratory and some simulation work but you rely heavily on actual real life data.”