Vac Work!

After a week or so holiday after finishing semester 2 at uni, i stepped onto the mine site at Consolidated Rutile Ltd (CRL) for Vacation work! I’ve been there for just over 5 weeks now, even though it feels like a lot less cause it’s been pretty fun so far. I’m on holidays atm and then start again next Wednesday.

I suppose I should explain what I’ve actually been doing there…so I’ll give a quick run down of how and what they mine first. CRL has 2 sand mines on North Straddie. They both work the same way and both collect the same minerals – Ilmenite, Zircon and Rutile (Titanium oxide). Basically, they pump wet sand out of a huge ‘pond’ directly onto a concentrator, which floats in the middle of the pond.

They do this by sluicing sand off a huge ‘face’ of sand (which the water is directly in front of), and then using a cutter that sits about 10 -15 metres underwater and churns the sand up. As the sand is being churned up a huge pump sucks up the slurry onto the concentrator. The cutter is on a big arm connected to what is called the dredge. So basically sand is pumped up from the dredge and then onto the concentrator.

Once the sand is on the concentrator, the name says it all – it concentrates the mineral in the sand! This is achieved mainly by a series of spirals that separate the heavier mineral from the much lighter sand using the basic principle of centrifugal force. That’s the beauty of the mining process – chemicals are not needed to purify the mineral.

After going through two mills of spirals, the mineral is then pumped into magnetic separators which separate the rutile and zircon (non magnetic) from the ilmenite (magnetic). From there, the two lots of concentrate are trucked to Dunwich and then shipped across the bay to Pinkenba for further concentration.

This post is getting fairly long so i'll try and keep the rest short.... so as to what I've been doing this whole time... pretty much anything and everything! I'm doing what i can to get a feel for everything so i have spent a few weeks just doing general maintenance work on all the pipelines around the mine, and the last couple of weeks i've been on the concentrator which has involved a lot of hosing and all kinds of odd jobs.

Its been awesome so far just being able to get a feel for how a mine operates and to actually be a part of that, even if only a small part. So from here my plan is to find my way around some more parts of the mine so that by the end of my stay i know all the ins and outs of sand mining and hopefully get a feel for where my interests specifically lie.

Bye for now, have a good one!