Miodrag,

 

Today I had a telephone call from Mr. Ken Reid. He is a former Chemistry professor at University of Minnesota and now consultant.

 

Mr Reid says he is working on a project for a client that wants to treat a mineral slurry with ultrasonics to improve yield. It sounds suspiciously like the project from Neil E. Ginther at San Juan Minerals in Oklahoma but it may be another project. He was not so open about the materials to treat or the client. I will learn more over time.

 

Anyway he says they will treat tons of slurry and they need a system like pipe-clamp technology. He has done preliminary ultrasonic testing on small sample with 50 watts at 1 MHz. He said that they had very good results and now they need to make a one day bench top test to see if lower frequency will work. If he sees a good result he expects to buy one lab system to make detailed testing and evaluation of operational parameters.

 

He would not say what is the slurry but he implies that it is minerals taken from tons of material. The slurry will probably be 10% to 17% solids to liquid (water). He said that they found better results with 10% and I explained that that would be better for the ultrasonic treatment as well.

 

Since it is very large volume of slurry he wants to use large diameter pipes. I explained we have tested with 4” pipe but larger is possible. He understands that larger pipes may require more converters on the same clamp and that there are limitations to the amount of acoustic penetration.

 

This could be a big project but it will take 1 month before first bench test is made then a couple of months of detailed lab tests then planning for production systems.

 

I think I explained well that we are the best system on the market for his application. I told him about other fixed frequency probe systems and he understood limitations and de-tuning of probes. He sees pipe clamp as a good solution if it works to improve yields.

 

He says he found Active Ultrasonics on the web so maybe he will find MPI.  If he makes contact with you by telephone or email please tell him directly we are working together to avoid and confusion. Let me coordinate our contact if he asks for more information.

 

Mario.