Dr John Farrow, of the Parker Centre and CSIRO Minerals, and leader of the P266 research team, says the concerted research focus on the performance of gravity thickeners has illuminated their mysterious inner workings.

Dr Robert La Nauze, WMC Resources' General Manager, Technology, says company engineers, working with Dr Farrow's team, had used the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model developed by the team to improve flocculant dispersal in a thickener at its Mt Keith nickel operation in Western Australia.

Similarly, at Olympic Dam in South Australia, the CFD model allowed WMC to improve its thickener operations to the point where it avoided the capital cost of a new thickener.

“People think of thickeners as a pretty archaic technology, but there's still much that can be done to make very significant improvements," says Perth-based Dr Farrow.

Gravity thickeners are used wherever mineral processing involves wetting the ore. Thickeners separate fine particles from the fluids, holding them in suspension to produce a thick mineral-rich slurry (the underflow) and a clear liquid stream (the overflow).

Some thickeners are up to 100 metres in diameter and treat tens of thousands of cubic metres of suspension per day. There are an estimated 2000 thickeners in the operations of the Australian and international companies who sponsor the current phase of the P266 project.