Imaging Process Control for Mining and Cominution of Construction Materials
Extraterrestrial mining activities will at first be concerned with the production of construction materials. Rock and earth materials can provide the strongest and most cost effective solutions. Scarce resources (energy, human intervention) in extraterrestrial mining operations, will limit many types of activities. At the same time, construction materials need to be processed, including blasting, crushing, screening, and milling, to exact specifications. Automation is the key to minimizing resource utilization, and optical sizing is crucial for these tasks, enabling automated process control without requiring excessive human quality control strategies.
Automated Online Optical Sizing Analysis
Optical fragmentation sizing has been in widespread use for many years now. It is now being used in the explosives, mining, and materials handling industries for the purpose of evaluating the efficiency of the comminution process, whether by blasting, crushing, grinding, or inadvertently by materials handling processes. On examination, there can be many inaccuracies with these methods, and the results do not always match screening results. Neitherless, there are many benefits to using optical sizing, as there is normally no feasible alternative to optical sizing. This paper discusses the limitations of such systems, the common errors that are made when implementing such systems, as well as the benefits and the proper way to use these systems, including some examples of applications.
The osprey process: principles and applications
Spray forming in the Osprey mode involves the sequential stages of atomization and droplet consolidation to produce near-net shape preforms. This review traces the history and development of the process with particular reference to the processing science base and attendant metallurgical principles. The process has been scaled up for the fabrication of tubular and billet-shaped products in stainless steels, superalloys, cast irons, tool steels, aluminum alloys, and copper alloys. Alloy development via spray forming has resulted in improved mechanical properties, compared to ingot metallurgy