PROGRAM

“Mineral liberation – The key to unlock the optimization problem of separation processes”

Prof. Jocelyn Bouchard
Université Laval (Canada)

Jocelyn Bouchard received a B.Eng. (materials and metallurgical engineering, 2001), M.Sc. (metallurgical engineering, 2004) and Ph.D. degrees (electrical engineering, 2007) from Université Laval. He worked at Niobec Mine, Xstrata Process Support and GENIVAR before accepting an academic position at his alma mater in 2012. He held the Agnico Eagle Mines Ltd and ArcelorMittal Mines chair in mineral processing education from 2012 to 2017. The Canadian Mineral Processors granted him the Bill Moore Special Achievement Award in 2014 in recognition of outstanding results achieved throughout the early part of his career in mineral processing. He was Visiting Scholar at the department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering of the University of Sheffield (UK) in 2019-2020. Prof. Bouchard chaired the 19th IFAC Symposium on Control, Optimization and Automation in Mining, Mineral and Metal Processing (Montreal, 2022). He is currently the director of Centre E4m, Université Laval research centre on geology and mineral resource engineering.

“Challenges of Fault Tolerant Control in the mining industry”

Prof. Ron Patton
University of Hull (UK)

Ron was born in Tarma, Peru. He graduated with BEng (E&EE), MEng (Control) and PhD (Control) degrees at the University of Sheffield UK (‘72,’74 & ’80). He was Lecturer at Sheffield Hallam (’78-’81), & York Universities (’81-’94), leaving York as Senior Lecturer to the Chair of Control & Intelligent Systems Engineering at Hull University in 1995, and is now Emeritus Professor. His life work includes mathematical modelling in Biology, ship positioning, fault diagnosis and fault tolerant flight/satellite control, and fault tolerant control for marine energy systems, with GS record of 33,167 citations (h72) (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5490-3139). He was awarded IEEE Fellow in 2010, for contributions to ‘Robust Fault Diagnosis and Fault Tolerant Control’. (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5490-3139). Ron is founder member of the IFAC TC Safeprocess (since 1990), leading Hull Safeprocess ’97 and was TC chair (’96-’02). He has co-authored/ authored books on Fault Diagnosis (4), Fault Tolerant Control (1) & Eigenstructure Assignment (1).

Experiences in Fault Tolerant Control: Suggestions for Mining/Metals

Abstract:
A closed-loop control system may have unsatisfactory performance or even instability when faults occur in actuators, sensors or other process components. Fault-tolerant control (FTC) involves the development and design of special controllers that are capable of tolerating the faults whilst still maintaining desirable and robust performance and stability properties. The talk will outline the main ideas and concepts in FTC design with an emphasis on the requirement (a) To develop the FTC system at the commencement of the overall system or plant development, this refers to the idea of “co-design” (b) The need to involve methods of hardware and/or analytical redundancy of system function as far as possible i.e. can the system measurements be duplicated perhaps with dissimilar technology or can the control systems be replicated in duplicate form? Examples will be outlined from various areas of engineering.

“Accelerating Technology Adoption in mining sector”

Prof. Neville Plint
The University of Queensland (Australia)

Dr. Neville Plint has a global reputation in the mining sector and has broad demonstrated experience in the mining and resource industry. His career has focused on delivering improved operational performance on mining sites by developing and implementing new technologies, whilst establishing a global network of research professionals in academic institutes, mining companies and research organizations. Neville has extensive leadership experience and a deep understanding of the mining sector.

Dr. Plint was the Institute Director, Sustainable Minerals Institute (SMI), at The University of Queensland. Whilst at Anglo American, Neville held multiple leadership roles including Head of Business Improvement Projects, and Head of Research and Development. Dr. Plint also held positions as board member and Director of Mining3; Managing Director of JKTech Pty Ltd and a member of UQ’s University Senior Management Group (USMG).