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discovered_01_2016

WWW.HZDR.DE discovered 01.16 RESEARCH and development as such, we are working with our own resources," says Johanna Lippmann-Pipke, project coordinator and physicist at the HZDR Institute of Resource Ecology. A central European point of contact The project is starting out with great momentum: "By the end of the first year, existing infrastructures and models of all scales – from molecular to industrial – must be inventoried and strategically assembled, and our website will go live," says Johanna Lippmann-Pipke. To this end, the partners’ individual strengths have to be compiled systematically so that third parties can clearly understand what is available. As NetFlot’s central point of contact, the website will forward any requests, such as reserving testing time, directly to the right project partner. "Our goal is to get as many scientists and corporations as possible to benefit from these expensive facilities and from our partners’ valuable expertise. Europe must make progress on this important front," the project coordinator summarizes. Flotation – an old procedure with room for improvement Flotation has been used to enrich ore metals since the end of the 19th century. Efforts to make it more economical and efficient are still underway to this day. "The quality of existing ores is dwindling due to massive mining in the past few decades, while demand for raw materials is growing enormously. We need more efficient technologies to make the mining of complex or hard-to-access repositories financially viable," Johanna Lippmann-Pipke explains. Three HZDR institutes are involved in the project. In addition to the Institute of Resource Ecology, the Institute of Fluid Dynamics and the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology also contribute their expertise. Lippmann-Pipke: "Even before the call for applications for this particular project, we were toying with the idea of collaborating on experiments and model approaches in the field of flotation." The first call for applications issued by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) RawMaterials (see box) suited their purposes perfectly. A flow of particles and gas bubbles While geo-ecologist and NetFlot manager Heike Hildebrand from the HZDR Institute of Resource Ecology brings her expertise on the transport behaviours of particles in highly complex systems, the HZDR Institute of Fluid Dynamics clearly excels in fundamental research on multi-phase flows and interactions between gas bubbles and the tiniest particles floating in the liquid. Uwe Hampel and his team of scientists, for instance, are trying to acquire a fundamental understanding of fluid-dynamic transport processes in flotation systems. Building on this insight, the NetFlot partners want to develop flow calculations to increase the efficiency of flotation equipment. "Flotation has been working for decades, but we don’t yet have a clear physical and chemical understanding of it," Martin Rudolph explains. He is a processing expert at the Freiberg institute. "In order to further optimize these processes, you need to understand their basic working principle." Therefore, he and his team are using an atomic force microscope to characterize the minerals that are involved in flotation. Their goal is to increase both yield and purity in ore processing. Their experiments are small- ANALYSIS: Doctoral candidate Bent Babel demonstrates current findings at the Raman spectroscope to physicist Johanna Lippmann- Pipke (left) and Heike Hildebrand, manager of the Net-Flot Project. Photo: Detlev Müller

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