Tapping into different gold resources
- Wits University
Extracting valuable metals from their natural source must be cost-effective and efficient.
Professor Sehliselo Ndlovu is an esteemed Metallurgical Engineer and advocate for Women in STEM who is dedicated to profitable valuable metal extraction.
And she plans to revolutionise the way metals are extracted. Professor Ndlovu is using a process known as cavitation to help her achieve this. Cavitation is widely used in fluid mechanics and engineering, and it even has medical applications. But, it has not been considered for metal extraction processes.
Professor Ndlovu recognised the need for a new approach for extracting gold. Traditional, easy-to-extract sources are becoming less readily available, so the gold industry will rely on more challenging sources in the future. Traditional extraction methods are not profitable for more challenging sources. Her method has shown promising results in the laboratory using different sources.
Not only has she improved how much gold is extracted, but she has done so in less time and using fewer extraction chemicals than traditional methods. The gold industry’s dream!
Professor Ndlovu’s next step is to test the technology on an industrial scale. She is confident that this innovation can boost the country’s economy by increasing the gold industry’s ability to extract more gold from sources that could not have been processed in the past while reducing the processing time and cost.