Work History | Simon Michaux

I am an Associate Professor working for the Geological Survey of Finland (Geologian Tutkimuskeskus) (GTK), in the KTR Circular Economy Solutions unit. My current roles at GTK are to develop geometallurgy capability in battery minerals, develop the GTK-Mintec pilot plant with digitization and machine learning upgrades, and develop the Circular Economy. Work has been done with the Mineral Intelligence group.

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My basic education was a Bachelor of Applied Science in physics and geology. My PhD was in Mining Engineering (Analysis of fines generation in blasting), done at the JKMRC (Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre), graduating in 2006. Most of my work experience is from the Australian mining industry. I studied and worked for the JKMRC (Sustainable Minerals Institute, or SMI) for 18 years, where I was involved in several high profile industry funded research programs.

Projects included the AMIRA P843, and P843A Geometallurgical Mine Mapping projects. In these projects I developed small scale comminution tests fit for purpose in geometallurgy and managed the experimental campaigns. In P843A, I was a them leader in the blasting module. Other projects included P9, AMSRI, and CSRP as part of the JKMRC Comminution Group. I was developing expertise in understanding rock breakage across the whole mining cycle, from blasting to crushing, to grinding to fine grinding. With my colleagues, I was attempting to develop a universal rock breakage model that was directly linked to rock characterization at all scales. I believed understanding mineralogy was very influential in grinding performance.

At the start of my career, I worked in exploration borehole geophysics in the Queensland Bowen Basin and New South Wales Hunter Valley coal reserves. This was done on multiple coal mine sites and in multiple green field exploration surveys.

My areas of technical interest were rock characterization, electrical dynamic fragmentation, engineering separation, material science, and multi-phase data analysis of geometallurgical data sets and modelling the mining process as a dynamic system. I believed that process plants need to be considered and modelled simultaneously as a whole circuit and as a collection of individual units, where each process unit also needs to be mass balanced in terms of mineralogy as well as mass transfer. Previous process engineering work has been in rock breakage, blast fragmentation and comminution. Work has been done in dust generation and dust plume modelling. I have also been studying the environmental fallout of industrialization.

I left the JKMRC for the private sector and worked an EPCM company called Ausenco in their Technical Solutions division. As this was a commercial engineering company, servicing mining corporate clients, geometallurgy had its most effective influence in a Pre-Feasibility Study. What was being attempted was an integration of geometallurgical data and Enterprise Optimization analysis (Whittle software). Part of my set tasks was the establishment a series of small scale tests I had seen as a researcher to be done through ALS Global in a commercial manner. In this work, I was forming a conduit between technical engineering design, executive management and mining investment personnel. During this time, I learned about industrial investment, due diligence and the problem solving done by investment analysts. I was developing a methodology that would optimise the three areas of engineering design, executive decision making and corporate investment together into a single coherent methodology.

I left Australia in September 2015, to go to Belgium in Europe.´to work as a Senior Research Officer in the GeMMe Dept of Géoressources Minérales & Imagerie Géolgique at the University of Liege. The goal was to leave the mining industry and learn industrial recycling process engineering and study the Circular Economy. My role was to develop department capability in electrodynamic fragmentation using a Selfrag EDF instrument. I was required to develop consortium alliances and partnerships between the GeMMe department and stakeholder groups across Europe (other universities, independent R&D groups, private sector corporations, EU government entities). A series of research proposals were written and submitted to H2020 and EIT KIC.