OBSERVATIONS FROM THE RESEARCH PROGRAMS REVIEW COMMITTEE

COO of the Centre, is thus clearly international in its composition and all the members enjoy excellent international reputations in the domain of minerals processing and hence it is well positioned to provide an international perspective on the research activities of the Centre.

The Panel has met on four occasions since the commencement of the Centre’s activities in 2020 and these have been either fully remote or in hybrid form. The Chair and Martin Rudolph also had the opportunity of a most useful engagement with the representative of (COEMinerals partner organisation) Jord.

Notwithstanding the challenges created by the COVID pandemic, probably the most significant of which was the difficulty of recruiting new PhD students, the Centre and especially its Director, Deputy Director and COO, deserve unstinting praise for successfully ensuring that the entire program is now at a stage at which it is clearly operating as near to optimally as possible.

The Leadership, together with the impressive cohort of Program Leaders and their collaborators, are all clearly fully committed to achieving the objectives of the Centre and any COVID-related backlog in terms of outcomes has now essentially been entirely resolved.

In its relatively short existence, the Centre has already achieved major research outcomes and already established itself as a leading international research centre with an enviable global reputation.

The Panel is of the view that the Centre, through the successful implementation of its declared strategy and through the dynamic leadership of its Director and his colleagues, is on a successful trajectory towards achieving its vision and ultimately all of its objectives.

Professor Cyril O’Connor

COEMinerals International Panel Chair

Emeritus Professor and Senior Research Scholar, Department of Chemical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Additional Advisory Panel Members

ƒ Dr Martin Rudolph, Head of Department of Processing of Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology (HZDR/HIF), Freiberg, Germany

ƒ Silvia Cristina Alves França, Director Centre for Mineral Technology (CETEM)

ƒ Dr Barun Gorain, President and CEO Ore2Metal Inc

The pace of Centre research gained considerable momentum across all three programs during 2022, with progress in multiple areas.

Centre research benefited from the participation of undergraduate and postgraduate students from different nodes in different projects. The research team grew, with more than 90% of the PhDs being recruited by the end of 2022.

Significant headway was made with progressing a suite of technologies towards eventual commercialisation, particularly in Thematic Objective 1, concerned with early gangue rejection.

A prominent and positive feature of Centre research is its interdisciplinary nature, which involves close collaboration between different nodes of the Centre and includes the exchange of research material (such as equipment, reagents and ores) as well as staff and students from several Centre nodes working on complementary aspects of various research problems.

While almost all the highest TRL technologies are from the UON, the role other nodes play in the connected path to commercialisation cannot be underestimated. This is balanced by more fundamental research in the other two Thematic Objectives, which relate to polymer science, fine particle separation and tailings disposal. As such, the Centre has innovative research and outcomes in multiple areas, spanning discovery to invention/ commercialisation.

It is worth mentioning the pre-emptive value of the Centre’s technical training in ethics as provided during the Annual Conference and attended by the researchers, and the ongoing value of increasing visits between Centre nodes, fuelling shared skill building and enabling technology access beyond any one university.

One of the benefits of the Centre’s approach is its close connectivity as a team, and with parts of the mineral sector. Building on this base, COEMinerals members could improve the extent of their industry networks, especially in the area of reagents, as well as growing their practical understanding of on-site problems faced by the industry ahead. The net result will be the better ability to understand and match contemporary industry problems to Centre solutions for greater impact, with the overall outcome being more sustainable minerals processing.

Additional Research Program Review Committee Members:

ƒ Centre Chief Investigator, Professor Peter Scales (UOM)

ƒ Centre Chief Investigator, Associate Professor Kym Runge (UQ)

ƒ Centre Associate Investigator, Dr Eirini Goudeli (UOM)

Professor Chris Aldrich Centre Chief Investigator (Curtin)