21st June 2024
Women in Engineering Day 2024: Meet some of our amazing Women in STEM / PhD Researchers featured on Social Media
Meet three incredible Women in Engineering / COEMinerals PhD Researchers, and learn about their research.
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Jackquline Eardley — University of Melbourne
Women in Engineering Profile — Chemical Engineering PhD candidate Jackquline Eardley (UOM)
Candice Brill — University of Queensland
Chemical Engineering PhD Candidate Candice Brill is working to make minerals processing less wasteful by ‘blowing bubbles’ and ‘making mud pies’
A fascination about how the earth’s minerals and metals are formed, combined with a love of chemistry, began Candice Brill’s journey towards chemical engineering as a profession.
Once an aspiring vulcanologist, Candice moved her focus to mineral and metal recovery methods, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Queensland.
Metals are fundamental for building the structures and objects that make up our everyday lives, and Candice wants to contribute to making their extraction from the earth more sustainable.
Through her research, Candice is discovering new and more effective ways to separate precious minerals from their ore as an ARC Centre of Excellence for Enabling Eco-Efficient Beneficiation of Minerals researcher.
Specifically, Candice is looking to improve the ‘flotation’ process, a commonly-used, initial stage of mineral separation technique that recovers metal bearing minerals (like copper, nickel and gold) from the ore that surrounds them. This separation method needs the ore to be mixed with water and ground into a fine powder — in a process which his one of the highest energy consuming stages of mining.
Candice’s work aims to better understand the chemistry behind the separation process. She is testing new ways to make larger (known as ‘coarse’) mineral particles float better, which will reduce the energy needed to grind rocks into very fine powders.
Some minerals are, or can be made hydrophobic, meaning they will repel water ‘like duck feathers’. Others can be hydrophilic / attracted to water. This means that different mineral particles can be encouraged to sink or float based on their affinity for water, with the help of air bubbles and by adding other ingredients to the mixture.
Candice explains: “This is where the complex chemistry comes in – ores contain many different minerals, making it extremely challenging to only make the minerals you want hydrophobic”.
“We blow bubbles through a liquid mix of mineral and water (‘slurry’), and the water-repelling (hydrophobic) minerals attach to air-bubbles — to ‘get away from’ the water — and float to the surface, where they can be recovered.”
“It’s exciting when an experiment responds the way you expect it to, thought-provoking when it doesn’t, and no matter how often you’ve repeated a particular test there are always observations that interest and surprise you,” she shares.
Much of Candice’s research relates to chalcopyrite, a copper-bearing mineral. She hopes her work will one-day be offer industry a better way to recover copper with less energy use, delivering cost and operational efficiencies to industry, as well as sustainability improvements.
Candice moved into PhD studies after having worked in industry. This meant many adaptions, but according to Candice, there are benefits to having experience in both ‘worlds’.
“I recommend everyone spend some time working in industry, to learn what is important and practical for industry, making you better equipped to think about how research can be applied and adopted.”
Doing a PhD enables a greater ability to, “really focus on projects with longer time horizons”. As a creative and practical problem-solver by nature, Candice also finds that PhD research offers her the ability for her to think deeply about a subject, which can have the benefit of finding unexpected solutions to challenging problems.
A value-add for chemical engineering as a profession is that it requires, “getting out from behind a desk”.
“Moving between the lab at the university and visiting industrial plants, where we explore challenges and test new ideas on a larger scale with industry, gives me a fuller view of how the innovation lifecycle, from idea to invention and application. I really like how applying scientific theory becomes ‘real’ in a lab or on a mine site. It requires all of your skills and senses as you work, often applying your knowledge in a new way, adapting and collaborating to solve challenges, and finding better solutions to solve problems knowing you are contributing to making a positive change in the world.”
Teamwork is an important skill for Candice, and in many workplaces, but it’s not always something immediately associated with completing a personal PhD. However, collaboration a necessary and value part of being a researcher with COEMinerals.
“I’m always learning and discovering how people in other fields think and do things, which is inspiring, and I’ve made personal connections with peers from other universities that I’m sure I’ll be in contact with in years to come.”
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When it comes to Women in Engineering / Engineering Careers:
While Women remain a minority in the engineering profession and STEM studies globally, Candice encourages others to considering engineering and STEM roles.
“If finding tangible solutions to real world problems is something that interests you, engineering is a good study and career choice.
“Yes, you may face problems – some people may try to make you feel like you don’t belong, and you may come across infrastructure, policies and systems that remind you that you’re operating in a world and profession designed for men — but you will also find wonderful people who support you and value what you have to contribute.
Margaret Amosah — University of Newcastle
Margaret Ekua Amosah is Recovering Minerals from Mining Waste
COEMinerals researcher, University of Newcastle PhD student Margaret Ekua Amosah travelled more than 16,000km to apply her minerals engineering experience and STEM skills in Australia, and to the challenging task of recovering ultrafine precious mineral and metal particles that are currently lost to tailings.
Her PhD research is focused on recovering ultrafine tin particles that are suspended in liquid ‘tailings’ reserves, because conventional technologies have been unable to recover them. Margaret’s work is finding a way.
When Australia’s international borders closed during COVID, Margaret found herself unable to relocate and take up the chemical engineering research role with the Centre. It took more than a year for that journey to occur. Accepting and extending an internship as a trainee gold-metallurgist in Ghana filled the time-gap. She joined a team where — by her estimate — women represented, “perhaps 1% of the department”.
Despite the diversity gap, she thrived. Now in her ARC Centre of Excellence for Enabling Eco-Efficient Beneficiation of Minerals researcher (COEMinerals) role in Australia, Margaret actively champions engineering careers and STEM studies as a contribution to helping address the diversity gap in engineering studies and careers around the world.
She shares: “I have had the privilege of conducting engaging experiments for high school students with my COEMinerals colleagues. The experience provided valuable insights from the intellectually curious minds of the school students. The best part for me was seeing the surprise and excitement on the students’ faces during the experiments. Outreach events enables students to ask questions and Learn more about engineering.”
Margaret strongly advocates for young people not to overlook the opportunity to embrace engineering study and careers, and to “get into it”, adding “it’s an esteemed profession, and it’s not as difficult as you may think”, and she is actively encouraging the next generation to consider STEM roles, and the importance of minerals to the world.
Applying academic learning to industry applications to improve mineral processing to help have a positive impact and to “change the world,” is something Margaret is keen to embrace as her career in engineering progresses. Her motivation comes from a desire to recover, reuse and reprocess waste, or as she phrases it, “turning waste into value”.
Currently Margaret is recovering tin from cassiterite (a tin ore) from mining waste; she’s the first person in the Centre to work on the intractable problem of reprocessing low-grade cassiterite from tailings.
Tin is a ‘quiet achiever’ material that resists corrosion, so it’s been commonly used in cans for food preservation, as a coating for steel (tin-plating) for some time. However, Tin is increasingly being recognised as pivotal to the energy transition and the digital revolution,[1] given it is in ‘everything electrical’ (predominantly in the solder and alloys). As such, it is an enabler for batteries and computing.
With the arrival of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT), and the growing interconnection of everyday objects embedded with technology (such as sensors, software, and processing units) that allow the exchange of data via the internet or other communications networks[2], tin is becoming a critical mineral for our future[3].
To achieve ultrafine tin particle separations, Margaret is working with new technology, The REFLUX Classifier (RC), invented by COEMinerals Director, who is also her PhD supervisor Laureate Professor Kevin Galvin of the University of Newcastle. Initially invented for other purposes, Marget has shown the RC is effective for ‘reprocessing’ tailings using gravity separation as part of her research.
Margaret’s approach enables fine and ultrafine dense tin particles to be separated; they sink to the bottom of the RC over time during processing. Without her work, the tin/mineral particles do not get separated when they’re stored in the ‘tailings dams’, but generally remain in a state of suspended animation.
“If we can get the strategy right for tin separations, we can test and apply the technique to recover other minerals, which hasn’t been done before.”
Beyond mineral recovery from waste, Margaret hopes her work will one-day impact, “how processing circuits are set up on mine sites and reduce the initial fine particle mineral loss, and therefore reduce waste volumes”. A next step in her research is to turn lab-findings into reality with a mine site trial.
[1] https://www.mining-outlook.com/commodities/tin-mining-sector/first-tin-tin-a-critical-metal-for-the-future
[2] https://www.statista.com/topics/8724/internet-of-things-iot-in-australia/#topicOverview
[3] https://www.mining-outlook.com/commodities/tin-mining-sector/first-tin-tin-a-critical-metal-for-the-future