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By John A. Church

AT a time when the treatment of gold and silver ore9 by fusion, in opposition to the mill-process, is attracting so much attention in this country, it may be useful to consider what is done in a well-conducted foreign work. For this purpose I will ask the reader to accompany me to Lend, in Austria, a small but thoroughly organized

By C. M. Marquardt

The minerals industry in general should bow in homage to the uranium milling industry. Those in the uranium milling industry have "spark- plugged" more progress in the application of instrumentation and control in the last 5 years than has been made in 50 years by the industry in general. Part of this real progress in the application of instrumentation and control has been born of necessity because milling processes are more complex. A lot of the impetus for instrumentation and control has come from the fact that the industry is new, the processes are new, and there are no hide-bound conventions to overcome. Part of it comes from the fact that much of processing is more chemical than metallurgical and the thinking of the process chemist has carried over into the plants. One need not elaborate on what instrumentation has done for the process chemical industries. Each new mill that is constructed, if of appreciable size, seems to employ more instrumentation than the previously completed plant. Plant A makes a break-through in the application of instrumentation to a particular part of the process and Plant B accepts this and goes one step farther, while Plant C, anticipating Plant B, makes two or three more steps before Plant B is entirely leveled out.

Jan 9, 1958

By F. Julius Fohs

A comparative balance sheet for 1924 and 1925 follows: 1925 1924 Barrels Barrels Gross production..................................... 763,000,000 714,000,000 Imports of crude oil.................................. 62,005,000 77,776,000 Imports of refined oil................................. 16,263,000 16,470,000 Total......................................... 841,268,000 808,246,000 Surplus supply....................................... 25,000,000 30,246,000 Indicated domestic demand........................... 704,465,000 667,000,000 Exports crude oil.................................... 13,353,000 17,913,000 Exports of refined oil................................. 98,450,000 93,087,000 Total......................................... 816,268,000 778,000,000 Stocks, Dec. 31 (crude 410,654,000).................... 538,000,000 513,000,000 These figures show an increase of 49,000,000 bbl. in production and little change in oil imported; 37,000,000 bbl. greater apparent domestic consumption and actually greater utility in consumption, due to increased gasoline production by cracking; and 1,000,000 bbl. more crude and refined oil exported in 1925 than 1924, representing a total apparent increased demand of 38,000,000 bbl. The excess of demand over supply in 1925 was 25,000,000 bbl. The increase of stocks over those at the close of 1924 was 25,000,000 bbl. Of the stocks on hand at the close of 1925, about 82,000,000 bbl. in California were not refinable. Imports from Mexico and South America It would not be surprising if, by 1930, we should actually welcome the imports from Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Trinidad. If these States produce 155,000,000 bbl. and use, perhaps, 30,000,-

Jan 1, 1927

By Zay Jeffries

IT is well known that many properties of a given metal vary with the size of grain or cell. For most industrial purposes, where high ultimate strength and high elastic limit are desired, the manufacturer tries to produce a. fine-grained structure. For some purposes, for example in transformer iron, a coarse-grained structure is desirable. The terms fine-grained and coarse-grained are used only in a relative sense. For example, a fine-grained cast copper might have grains 100 times larger than coarse-grained high-speed steel. Similarly, a fine-grained steel rail might have grains or cells 100 times larger than coarse-grained wire, which was made of steel from the same heat. In some metals, the change in grain size is more appreciable than the changes in any of the properties determined by the tensile test. Furthermore, in metals which have been annealed or subjected to high temperatures, grain size may prove to be a better indication of the life of the metal in use than the tensile test. One of the authors was able to supplant the tensile test with grain-size determinations in the control of. metal for a specific use, the latter determination being more indicative of. the life of the metal part than the tensile test. A grain-size determination with a tensile test is, of course, more valuable than either singly. At present there is a decided dearth of data on actual grain-size determinations in metals, and consequently a corresponding lack of ability to interpret the determinations after they are made. It would be desirable to have correlation made between grain size and properties of metals, comparing thousands of determinations. In this way, grain-size determinations might be interpreted in much the same manner that tensile tests are now.

Jan 12, 1915

By R. L. Stephenson

IN plants casting electric-furnace ingots and converting them immediately into blooms, billets, slabs, bars or forgings, the criterion of quality performance is the soundness of the semifinished or finished product. When rejections are necessary, it is not always obvious whether the defects were caused by an unsound ingot or by improper treatment during the heating and forming operations. To evaluate the effects of the numerous factors involved, it is necessary to accumulate a large number of detailed observations and to analyze and interpret these data properly. Even after a thorough investigation has been conducted, it is impossible, in some cases, to isolate the cause of the defect and say that it is definitely the result of an unsound condition in the ingot or mistreatment of the ingot during further processing. Two factors that are extremely difficult to evaluate are the chemical composition of the steel and time from finish pour to charge in the soaking pits or "track time," and it is necessary to evaluate their combined effects before many other factors can be studied. Plain carbon, fine-grained steel in the range of 0.18 to 0.23 pct carbon, is very susceptible to cracking and the longer the elapsed time between the pouring of the ingots and stripping for charging into the soaking pits, the higher the billet rejections for cracks are found to be. Below 0.15 pct carbon and above 0.30 pct the track time

Jan 1, 1947

By Roy Hardy

THE Getchell mine is a comparatively recent discovery in the old Potosi mining district, Humboldt County, Nevada, a district organized in the seventies and eighties, in which some prospecting was done in several metamorphic zones along a monzonite-sedimentary contact. The district had no production in the early days and no further work was done until the same metamorphic zones were prospected for tungsten (scheelite) in 1917 and 1918, when a few small lots were shipped. It again lay dormant until 1934, when prospectors investigated a large siliceous escarpment at one end of the old district where outcroppings were a prominent feature of the topography. Undoubtedly, during the early prospecting of the district, the outcroppings had been investigated for mineral, probably by panning, with negligible results because the gold later found is invisible in the concentrate and is refractory. A fire assay revealed the presence of sufficient gold to warrant develop-ment work. The outcroppings were easily prospected by short tunnels having their portals in the siliceous material on the hanging-wall side, with a maximum distance to crosscut to the footwall of 135 ft., or a distance at right angle to dip of 60 to 90 ft. Development work, reaching a depth of over 600 ft. on the dip of the vein, was done by means of various crosscut tunnels, winzes and laterals. A churn-drill hole was also sunk, which intersected the vein at a depth of 1100 ft. on the dip. Sufficient development work of this character was completed by 1937 to justify the erection of a reduc-tion plant to roast the sulphide ore and cyanide the calcine, and to treat the oxidized ore by straight cyanidation, to make a doré bullion for shipment to the mint. The erection of the plant was started that year and finished early in 1938, with a combined capacity of about 800 tons per day. It has operated continuously since erection and recently was enlarged to handle 1000 tons per day. The vein dips with the slope of the mountain, and by stripping the hanging wall the ore may be mined by power shovel for several hun-dred feet below the outcrop. Thereafter underground methods will be necessary.

Jan 1, 1940

By John W. Langley

The papers of Mr. W. J. Keep, read before this Institute, have called attention to the influence of aluminum in cast-iron and on iron and steel castings. The information in these papers is interesting and valuable, as showing the modifications which iron undergoes when dosed with sufficient aluminum to form a distinct alloy, the quantity of the alloying metal used being such that the amount remaining in the casting is sufficient to be readily discovered by analysis. The same is also true of the so-called aluminum-steel patented by R. A. Hadfield, where the proportions specified are such as to leave in the finished steel from one-twentieth to one-tenth of one per cent. of aluminum. Whether these alloys are of practical utility or not has thus far . not been proved by any extended tests on a large scale, and until such evidence is forthcoming it may be safely held, provisionally, that such a use of aluminum is of doubtful utility. But there is another function which this metal can perform that has been known for some time, and which has passed beyond the experimental stage, viz.: its beneficial effect in securing sound ingots. It appears to be a general property of all metals when in the fluid state and at a temperature considerably above their points of fusion, to contain gas, either dissolved from the air or frorn the furnace, or else self-evolved by internal reactions. Silver, perhaps, shows this power in the highest degree, and mercury and lead in the least; midway stands steel—the quantity of gas which it can hold in solution, or " occlusion " as it has been called, varies with its temperature, its composition, and its mode of manufacture. When the steel sets in the mould, a portion of this gas escapes, causing blow-holes, surface defects, boiling-over, wildness, and quite a long train of troubles, familiar to all practical steel-makers. Ferro-silicon has long been used as a quieting agent. The first extended use of it for this purpose was made at Terre-Noire, in

Jan 1, 1892

By J. P. Witherow

MR. BIRKINBINE'S description of the bad working and sudden chilling of the Warwick Furnace last summer, seems to me quite phenomenal in blast-furnace practice. During my connection with the management of blast furnaces for many years, in the anthracite, coke, and raw-bituminous coal districts, such a case has never come under my notice. It seems to me that the scaffold in the zone of fusion could not have established itself (so that the whole power of the engines, with a blast pressure ranging from 12 to 18 pounds per square inch, could not penetrate), unless the furnace was previously badly scaffolded and bridged in some of its upper sections, from 15 to 30 feet above the hearth level, either in the zone of chemical action or the beginning of the zone of fusion. Such a "barrier to the upward gaseous currents would cause a suspension of combustion which may have superinducedd the scaffold that is assumed to have existed in the zone of fusion. It is Difficult to conceive' that an agglomerated mass almost across the section of the lower bosh should have formed all at once, if the furnace was free and porous for the reaction of the gaseous currents above. Therefore, I think, the Warwick furnace was by no means in as free, open, and fine internal condition at the time the trouble commenced as the description of its regular working would lead us to suppose. I do not question the accuracy of the statements relative to the output of iron, etc. I merely claim that the phenomena., as described, could not have been almost instantaneously developed, unless there had been an incipient seaffold and lodgment above the zone of fusion. I would state my hypothesis to be that the stock lodged or collected in some of its upper sections during the process of blowing-in, on which, as a basis, more or less accumulations may .have lodged, and thus, indirectly, caused the formation of the suc- * This paper was not presented to the Institute in its present form, but is based on remarks, in discussion, by the author on Mr. Birkinbine's paper on, a Short Blast at the Warwick Furnace, and Mr. Witherbee's paper on Two Scaffolds at the Cedar Point Furnace.

Jan 1, 1881

By H. W. Graham

THE young metallurgist of today who thinks casually of the technical literature of the steel industry might conclude that little has been published concerning the Bessemer process. This conclusion is true as relating to the last decade or two, but there is a fairly voluminous Bessemer literature in the period of 1860 to 1910, Since that time, however, an entirely new level of metal-lurgical knowledge of steelmaking has been reached; and the present paper is simply an effort to look broadly from this new level and to bring the recorded history of the process up to date, It is an effort to appraise the acid Bessemer method of steelmaking in the light of today's technical knowledge thereof. In this paper matters of history will be dealt with only insofar as they contribute to an understanding of today's situation. Attention will be directed to the apparent causes of past developments in seeking to perceive the true direction of trends now in existence and effective as bearing upon future developments. The paper will discuss the economics of the Bessemer process, but only to the extent that will bear upon the metallurgist's understanding of his respon-sibility. The problem of the quality of Bes-semer steel will be reviewed and examples will be given of the technical data upon which the reasoning of the paper is based, Matters of engineering design, mechanical maintenance, operation and metallurgical investigation will be surveyed. Compari-sons will be made between the Bessemer and open-hearth processes for the sake of clear and ready understanding,

Jan 1, 1940

By Abram S. Hewitt

GENTLEMEN : If my first words were other than those of thanks for the high honor of being called to preside over the American Institute of Mining Engineers, I should do injustice alike to you and to my own sense of the obligation, under which I have been placed by your voluntary choice. When the position was first suggested to me, I resolutely declined to allow the use of my name, on the ground that, by training and occupation, I was not entitled to this honor, which, it then seemed to me, should be conferred only on a professional engineer. In fact, the history of the Institute, which had honored itself, as well as my distinguished predecessors, David Thomas, Rossiter W. Raymond, and Alexander L. Holley, by elevating them to its highest office, seemed to indicate the line and the limit of safe precedent, in which I did not then see how I could be included. But my scruples were finally removed by the consideration that, as in the course of human industry, the pioneer, of whom Mr. Thomas was so marked a type, must precede the mining engineer, so fitly personified in Dr. Raymond, and be followed by the mechanical engineer, whose incarnation we behold in Mr. Holley; so all these must be supplemented by the man of affairs and finance, in order that "enterprises of great pith and moment" may be prosecuted to a successful issue. I felt, therefore, that I had no longer any right to resist your preference, or to deprive myself of what I must regard as the crowning honor of an active career. On an occasion like the present it seems appropriate to review the history in this country, during the last hundred years, of those industries which the Institute of Mining Engineers specially represents. There is much in the story with which other members of this body are more familiarly acquainted than myself; yet I fancy that to all of them, and not less to our distinguished and most heartily welcome guests from abroad, a comprehensive outline of the progress of mining and metallurgy in the United States will prove interesting. I ask your attention, therefore, to a condensed account of that subject, embracing a statement of the beginnings of the industry on our shores, of the notable events attending its increase, and of its present

Jan 1, 1877

By Hon. Abrams S. Hewitt

Gentlemen : If my first words were other than those of thanks for the high honor of being called to preside over the American Institute of Mining Engineers, I should do injustice alike to you and to my own sense of the obligation, under which I have been placed by your voluntary choice. When the position was first suggested to me, I resolutely declined to allow the use of my name, on the ground that, by training and occopation, I was not entitled to this honor, which, it then seemed to me, should be conferred only on a professional engineer. In fact, the history of the Institute, which had honored itself, as well as my distinguished predecessors, David Thomas, Rossiter W. Raymond, and Alexander L. Holley, by elevating then] to its highest office, seemed to indicate the line and the limit of safe precedent, in which I did not then see how I could be included. But my scruples were finally removed by the consideration that, as in the course of human industry, the pioneer, of whom Mr. Thomas was so marked a type, must precede the mining engineer, so fitly personified in Dr. Raymond, and be followed by the mechanical engineer, whose incarnation we behold in Mr. Holley; so all these must be supplemented by the man of affairs and finance, in order that "enterprises of great pith and moment" may be prosecuted to a successful issue. I felt, therefore, that I had no longer any right to resist your preference, or to deprive myself of what I must regard as the crowning honor of an active career. On an occasion like the present it seems appropriate to review the history in this country, during the last hundred years, of those industries which the Institute of Mining Engineers specially represents. There is much in the story with which other members of this body are more familiarly acquainted than myself; yet I fancy that to all of them, and not less to our distinguished and most heartily welcome gnests from abroad, a comprehensive outline of the progress of mining and metallurgy in the United States mill prove interesting. I ask your attention, therefore, to a condensed account of that subject, embracing a statement of the beginnings of the industry on our shores, of the notable events attending its increase, and of its present

By P. G. Shewmon, J. Y. Choi

The surface-diffusion coefficient for , has been measured on (111) and (100) surfaces of copper from 1000" to 620°C. D,(Ge) on the (111) is two to three times that on the (100) as was found earlier for copper and gold on copper. D, (Ge) on both (111) and (100) is about thirty times that found for gold or copper tracers on the same surfaces, while in the temperature range where both D,(Ge) and Ds(Au) have been measured the activation energy for germanium is the same as that for gold. The apparent activation energy for Ds(Ge) is not a constant, but decreases with temperature. In a recent paper we reported on the application of a new tracer technique to the determination of the surface-diffusion coefficient (D,) for gold and copper on (111) and (100) surfaces of copper.' In this paper, we shall give the results obtained when the same technique was used to measure Ds for germanium on the (111) and (100) surfaces of copper. In addition to providing data on D., for an additional element on copper, the longer half-life of germanium (275 days) meant that Ds could be measured down to a much lower temperature and thus over a much wider temperature range (1000" to 620°C) than was used in our gold-tracer work (1060" to 780°C) or copper mass-transport studies (1060" to 800). The apparent activation energy for D, (Ge) is essentially the same as that found for gold or copper in the same temperature range, though the values of D, (Ge) are thirty times greater than those found for gold or copper tracers. The most interesting new result found is that the apparent activation energy for Ds(Ge), and thus Do, definitely increases with temperature. Such a trend was much more apparent in Gjostein's mass-transport work on copper than in our own, though in an earlier paper we mentioned the difficulty of fitting all of our points with one straight line:= No real explanation of this is given though experiments done on grain boundary groove growth at various ambient pressures demonstrate unequivocally that vapor transport plays no part in the increase in activation energy with temperature.

Jan 1, 1964

By Joseph B. Umpleby

The oil industry is at the parting of the ways in relating fundamental engineering concepts to legal interpretations and field practices. The old concept, based on an erroneous analogy to wild game, that oil and gas are migratory substances and belong to him who reduces them to possession regardless of their point of origin in the reservoir, has come to be quite generally recognized as the basis of many of the serious ills and extravagances of the industry. The chain of consequences resulting from this erroneous conception has been traced elsewhere and need not be recounted here. The important problem at this stage in the development of the industry, when laws are being revised by legislative action and modified by court decisions; when added powers are being exercised by voluntary committees and official regulatory bodies; and when the need for control of output has forced itself to the forefront, is to see to it that new law and action are based on sound engineering concepts. Reservoir Energy Common Property Since the study of gas instituted by the Marland committee of the American Petroleum Institute in 1927, a great mass of information has accumulated concerning the function of gas in the development and production of oil. This wealth of data leads to the conclusion that every oil pool contains three resources: Oil, gas and reservoir energy. I take it that the central problem of this symposium is the ownership of these three resources and that "source" and "utilization" are involved because of their bearing on ownership through the demands of equity and conservation. In order to facilitate the discussion, permit me to state categorically, that: The oil and gas in a particular tract should belong to the owners of the mineral rights in that particular tract, but the reservoir energy should be common property of all owners of mineral rights in the pool I take it that apportionment of oil and gas among owners according to the relative amounts that exist in place in their respective tracts is

Jan 1, 1933

Zinc is just now a very important metal. Its use in cartridges and shrapnel brass are in the public eye. But its uses after the war are no less important. Brass as an engineering material for electrical machin-ery, journal bearings, and plumbing fixtures takes fully 50 per cent. of the production, and its use in these lines would have been increased in the last few years but for the price. Its use for barbed wire is probably more in war time than in peace. In the composition of paints, it is becoming more and more necessary. One of the forms of pigment, litho- pone, is the base of nearly all interior wall paints; of all the sanitary enamels for bath-rooms and bath-tubs, and is now in great demand. Zinc oxide is also increasing in use for paint, and for manufacture of linoleum. When we realize that this district-Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas and Arkansas-produces now over one-third of the zinc ore of the world, it is at once seen that a meeting where the geology, mining, concentration

Jan 6, 1917

By Mark C. Malamphy

During colonial times, Brazil was famous for the richness of her alluvial gold deposits. Paul Ferrand has estimated that the gold produced during the period from 1700 to 1820 was the equivalent of some 64 million pounds sterling. Since that time, most of the more prolific alluvial deposits have been exhausted. A few gold mines are still functioning, notably the Morro Velho mine, which is one of the deepest mines in the world. Today, the gold production of Brazil is insignificant when compared with world figures, but there are still many gold-bearing regions and it is probable that in at least some of them profitable returns would result from an exploitation program taking advantage of all the most modern innovations in gold mining and ore treatment on a large scale. In order to demonstrate the value of some of these abandoned prospects and stir up interest in increasing the national gold production, the government has stimulated research. Experimental plants have been and are being established in various places, and tests on large quantities of ores are being carried out on a semicommercial basis. The Geological Survey of the State of Minas Geraes is very active in this line and the Federal Institution is also showing an increased interest in the matter. One of the lesser known gold-bearing regions of Brazil is in the vicinity of Lavras, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Gold was first reported from this region in the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1811, D. João VI sent an experienced prospector from Minas Geraes to investigate the validity of the reports. According to the reports of Baron Eschwege, he succeeded in extracting some 30,000 Oitavos (about 105 kg.) during the first few years, but the production costs exceeded the value of the gold obtained.

Jan 1, 1934

By S. W. Parr, F. B. Hobart

Studies relating to the behavior of coal toward oxygen may have for their purpose the determination of the fundamental factors that underlie spontaneous combustion, weathering and deterioration, and the general topic of storage, as well as those properties that have to do with the underlying principles of carbonization. There is also involved the possibility of developing information relating to the constitution of coal, or at least the chemical properties inherent in the type substances of which the coal is composed. It is the purpose here to record certain results bearing on this latter idea of the chemical properties that characterize the main constituents of bituminous coal. The avidity of freshly mined coal for oxygen has long been known. What happens to the coal or to the oxygen is not so clear. Is the oxygen absorbed or chemically combined, and what are the conditions as to time, temperature, texture, or components that are most involved in the phenomenon? If we subject a weighed quantity of coal maintained at a constant temperature to a current of oxygen, we may obtain three factors of interest—the weight increase of the coal, the weight of the water, and the weight of the carbon dioxide formed in the reactions involved at that

Jan 1, 1925

By Carolyn Barnes

The Offshore Technology Conference, the world's largest technical conference and exhibition on the development of offshore resources and protection of the ocean environment, is sponsored annually in Houston, Texas, by 12 international engineering and scientific societies. This year's OTC, the seventh, will be held May 5-8 at the Astrodomain, and will be the largest in its history. The technical program for the first meeting in 1969 consisted of 100 papers, an exhibit display of 380 booths, and an attendance of 4300. This year. 280 technical papers are to be presented, and more than 2800 exhibit booths, representing some 1200 companies and nine countries, will be on display for an anticipated audience of 40,000.

Jan 4, 1975

By C. R. Garr, A. R. Troiano

FLAKING or hair-line crack formation has been a major problem confronting the producer of large alloy steel forgings.' Today it is generally conceded that hydrogen in one or more forms in alloy steel sections is a requisite for flaking. Hence an obvious remedy is a thermal cycle that reduces the hydrogen content to some low level. In practice, this generally means holding the material at some subcritical temperature for a period of time depending on the size of the ingot or forging. Another method that will suffice in some cases is to cool large forgings slowly, i.e., bury in ashes. In practice, this hydrogen bake is sometimes accemplished inadvertently by a series

Jan 1, 1958

By Carl Swartz

ALTHOUGH a number of articles appeared during the war advocating the use of cadmium in lead-tin solders, very little information of value can be found in the literature regarding the properties of solders containing cadmium. In most of the published articles the cadmium seems to have been considered merely as a partial substitute for tin in a tin-lead alloy rather than as an essential constituent of a ternary alloy. The primary object of the substitution of cadmium for tin was to lessen the amount of tin required, at a time when the latter was scarce and high-priced, and thus to produce a cheaper solder. While this object was accomplished, the new properties resulting from a change from a binary lead-tin alloy to a ternary lead-tin-cadmium alloy were not given proper consideration in many cases. For the past few years, the American Smelting & Refining Co. has been marketing a very considerable amount of cadmium in the form of lead-tin-cadmium alloys for use as solders for certain special purposes, and the successful use of these solders suggested that if more extensive knowledge were available concerning the properties of lead-tin-cadmium alloys of various compositions their field of usefulness might be materially extended. The investigation described in the present paper was undertaken to obtain this information and, by means of tests under conditions approaching those of practical use, to determine the suitability of cadmium solders for various purposes.

Jan 1, 1928

When Ponce de León landed in Florida in 1573 he was told of an Indian chief that possessed much gold. In 1576 Diego Meruelo obtained some of it from the Indians, and in 1579 Álvarez de Pineda reported that the natives wore ornaments of gold, which they obtained from the rivers. These statements all refer to the southern Appalachian region. The name is recorded in 1527; when Pamphilo Narváez landed at Tampa he heard that there was much gold to be obtained in a region named Apalache. * In 1564 René Laudonnière describes the methods used by the natives to win gold in the Apalatcy mountains.† However, no serious mining operations were undertaken until long afterward; the mining of gold in the Southern States may be said to have had its beginning when a nugget was found at the Reed mine, in North Carolina, in 1799. This nugget, which was of "the size of a small smoothing iron", was kept for several years before the finder learned what it was, but later more lumps, one weighing 28 pounds, were found in the same locality, and eager digging ensued. ‡ Thomas Jefferson, in his `Notes on Virginia', mentions the finding of a quartz specimen, not a nugget as is generally stated, that contained 17 pennyweights of gold; this was found on the Rappahannock river in 1782. §

Jan 1, 1932