Mathematical Sciences - Colloquium

Mineral leaching is a technique for extracting mineral ore from rock.  The situation of interest here is so-called "in situ" leaching, where the idea is to remove the mineral directly, without first having to dig up the rock and bring it to the surface for crushing.  The way this is done is to introduce a corrosive fluid (such as acid) into the rock, and dissolve the mineral of interest.  This is then pumped to the surface as a solution.

This naturally raises the question of where the acid goes once it has been injected into the rock, and what percentage of it can actually be recovered.  This talk will present a new design strategy, that can in principle recover all the injected acid.  This is expected to be of considerable economic and environmental benefit.  The solution makes use of a rather novel Green function combined with a numerical solution, and shows how powerful applied mathematics can be as a design tool.
 

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