:: Manqiu Xu wins The Bill Moore Special Achiever Award

Chairman, Steve Wilson introduced this year’s winner of The Bill Moore Special Achiever Award, Manqiu Xu of INCO, at the CMP Annual Meeting in Ottawa in January. This award is presented in memory of Bill Moore, a very active CMP member for many years, to recognize special achievement to our industry and organization. Typically the award is presented to a younger member. Manqiu Xu of INCO is one of those individuals who, in his own words "was born to be a mineral processing researcher". After obtaining his Bachelors degree in China he came to McGiIl to study with Jim Finch and obtained his Masters and PhD degrees in short order. He joined INCO soon after graduating in 1991 and set about becoming a flotation expert in the field of copper and nickel flotation. He has several patents and many publications to his credit and has been a frequent contributor to CMP conferences.

Manqiu Xu accepting the Bill Moore Special Achiever Award from Past CMP Chairman Jan Nesset

Highlights of two of his achievements which qualify him for this award are:

Firstly, the development of the Feed Aeration Concept in column flotation, an approach which was patented in 1995 and which has been adopted into several newly created flotation devices. One example being for bitumen recovery from oil sands. Dr Xu was invited to write a chapter on "The Pre-aeration of Feed” for the volume Encyclopedia of Separation Science in 2000.

A second achievement of note has been his championing of a portable mini-pilot plant to duplicate the Cu-Ni flotation and separation process. The mini-plant demonstrated that additional regrinding, circuit reconfiguration and the use of TETA and sodium sulfite would significantly improve Ni recoveries. The changes were made and the Clarabelle mill has since been consistently achieving 4-5% higher recoveries.