Amira Global is celebrating its Members, new and old. Today we shine the spotlight on Axis House.
What would you like the Amira community to know about your business?
Along with the product range that covers multiple mineral processes, Axis House’s service offering includes technical problem-solving through laboratory and field testing. The development of products, as well as the application of the products on customer sites, are an essential part of the business. Axis House’s technical department continuously works on projects that cover general mineral processing issues as well as addressing specific processing problems of customers. Axis House aims to partner with customers and address the mineral processing problems they are facing, and the continuous product development continues after the first sales are made.
What is the problem that, if solved, would make the biggest difference to our industry?
The major problem can be grouped under selective flotation of minerals, which includes the selective recovery of specific minerals of value in a particular circuit, as well as the rejection of the unwanted minerals. Specific problems would include the rejection of iron sulphides, which are the major contaminant in sulphide mineral flotation. The efficient flotation of oxide minerals could also be classed under this topic and if all of this could be achieved with safe, economical, and customised collectors and/or depressants, it would have a big impact on the industry.
What to you think are the greatest challenges to successful collaboration and how can they be overcome?
The biggest challenge would be the differences in the individual’s philosophy towards product development, and which problems to address for specific operations of the industry. Collaboration with partners in the same field or another aspect of mineral processing needs to have aligned objectives to reach a common goal.
Innovation has its origins in addressing challenges or leveraging R&D. What are your success stories?
Axis House’s R&D is driven by addressing problems at specific customer sites. The technical staff has been involved in many projects at the Axis House Metallurgical laboratory and test work in the field to develop the current reagent range. Success stories include the development of flotation collectors, which showed significant improvements in selectivity and recovery in Copper sulphide operations, specifically in Zambia. Axis House’s Oxide collector range has also been widely implemented at oxide copper operations in the DRC. More recently, the development of products for the solid-liquid separation processes are showing to be very successful. These include a highly efficient flocculant range and crud mitigation reagents for the thickener and leaching applications.
Axis House has also been successful in developing collectors that can be used as alternatives to xanthates, improving the flotation performance while reducing the overall operating costs.