Applicability of siberian placer mining technology to Alaska

The result of Perestroyka and Glasnost has been an awakening of potential for cooperation between East and West. Nowhere has that been better demonstrated than between Alaska and Magadan Province, USSR. This report summarizes a one year effort financed by ASTF, with participation from several technical organizations, to establish contacts with the Siberian placer mining industry. The purpose of the project was to provide initial assessment of the Soviet technology for placer mining in permafrost. A ten day trip to Magadan province by an ASTF team and a similar length visit to Alaska by the Soviet mining group representing the All Union Scientific and Research Institute of Gold and Rare Metals, (VNII-I), Magadan are described. The report also reviews translated data on mining in permafrost and describes surface and underground placer mining technology developed by the Soviets. The report also lists relevant publications on Soviet mining research and state of the art Soviet mining technology and expertise

Analysis and optimization of material flow inside the system of rotary coolers and intake pipeline via discrete element method modelling

There is hardly any industry that does not use transport, storage, and processing of particulate solids in its production process. In the past, all device designs were based on empirical relationships or the designer's experience. In the field of particulate solids, however, the discrete element method (DEM) has been increasingly used in recent years. This study shows how this simulation tool can be used in practice. More specifically, in dealing with operating problems with a rotary cooler which ensures the transport and cooling of the hot fly ash generated by combustion in fluidized bed boilers. For the given operating conditions, an analysis of the current cooling design was carried out, consisting of a non-standard intake pipeline, which divides and supplies the material to two rotary coolers. The study revealed shortcomings in both the pipeline design and the cooler design. The material was unevenly dispensed between the two coolers, which combined with the limited transport capacity of the coolers, led to overflowing and congestion of the whole system. Therefore, after visualization of the material flow and export of the necessary data using DEM design measures to mitigate these unwanted phenomena were carried out.Web of Science117art. no. 184

Metal Recovery via Automated Sortation

Each year, millions of tons of non-ferrous scrap metal are discarded in the US. This metal is wasted due to a lack of proper recovery methods. Recent developments in spectroscopic technology have made it possible to identify the waste composition of scrap metal in real-time. This has opened the door for high-speed automated metal sortation and recovery, especially for the recovery of high value precious metals, such as titanium, nickel, cobalt, molybdenum and tantalum. Automated sortation systems typically consist of three main phases: (i) Feeding of material, (ii) Composition identification, and (iii) Physical separation. Due to their low volume and industry fragmentation, high-strength precious metal chips usually come in the form of chips smaller than 10 mm. Therefore it is extremely difficult to feed metal chips individually into the sorting system. At CR3, a new feeding mechanism was invented and developed in order to provide single layer feeding of small metal chips. A laboratory-scale prototype was built and proven to be feasible, scalable and reliable. A model was developed to predict the output of feeding variables based on initial input parameters. An operation window of the process was also defined for various metal chip resources. These will be presented, reviewed and discussed in the following paper

Non-destructive technologies for fruit and vegetable size determination - a review

Here, we review different methods for non-destructive horticultural produce size determination, focusing on electronic technologies capable of measuring fruit volume. The usefulness of produce size estimation is justified and a comprehensive classification system of the existing electronic techniques to determine dimensional size is proposed. The different systems identified are compared in terms of their versatility, precision and throughput. There is general agreement in considering that online measurement of axes, perimeter and projected area has now been achieved. Nevertheless, rapid and accurate volume determination of irregular-shaped produce, as needed for density sorting, has only become available in the past few years. An important application of density measurement is soluble solids content (SSC) sorting. If the range of SSC in the batch is narrow and a large number of classes are desired, accurate volume determination becomes important. A good alternative for fruit three-dimensional surface reconstruction, from which volume and surface area can be computed, is the combination of height profiles from a range sensor with a two-dimensional object image boundary from a solid-state camera (brightness image) or from the range sensor itself (intensity image). However, one of the most promising technologies in this field is 3-D multispectral scanning, which combines multispectral data with 3-D surface reconstructio

Design and Control of Warehouse Order Picking: a literature review

Order picking has long been identified as the most labour-intensive and costly activity for almost every warehouse; the cost of order picking is estimated to be as much as 55% of the total warehouse operating expense. Any underperformance in order picking can lead to unsatisfactory service and high operational cost for its warehouse, and consequently for the whole supply chain. In order to operate efficiently, the orderpicking process needs to be robustly designed and optimally controlled. This paper gives a literature overview on typical decision problems in design and control of manual order-picking processes. We focus on optimal (internal) layout design, storage assignment methods, routing methods, order batching and zoning. The research in this area has grown rapidly recently. Still, combinations of the above areas have hardly been explored. Order-picking system developments in practice lead to promising new research directions.Order picking;Logistics;Warehouse Management

Benchmarking a DEM‐CFD Model of an Optical Belt Sorter by Experimental Comparison

A DEM-CFD (discrete element method - computational fluid dynamics) model of an optical belt sorter was extensively compared with experiments of a laboratory-scale sorter to assess the model\u27s accuracy. Brick and sand-lime brick were considered as materials. First, the transport characteristics on the conveyor belt, involving mass flow, lateral particle distribution and proximity, were compared. Second, sorting results were benchmarked for varying mixture proportions at differing mass flows. It was found that the numerical model is able to reproduce the experimental results with high accuracy

COMBINED DEEP AND SHALLOW KNOWLEDGE IN A UNIFIED MODEL FOR DIAGNOSIS BY ABDUCTION

Fault Diagnosis in real systems usually involves human expert’s shallow knowledge (as pattern causes-effects) but also deep knowledge (as structural / functional modularization and models on behavior). The paper proposes a unified approach on diagnosis by abduction based on plausibility and relevance criteria multiple applied, in a connectionist implementation. Then, it focuses elicitation of deep knowledge on target conductive flow systems – most encountered in industry and not only, in the aim of fault diagnosis. Finally, the paper gives hints on design and building of diagnosis system by abduction, embedding deep and shallow knowledge (according to case) and performing hierarchical fault isolation, along with a case study on a hydraulic installation in a rolling mill plant.shallow knowledge, diagnosis, flow systems