Abstract

JOFFRE ENCINAS, Juan E. Metallurgy of the future. Rev. Met. UTO [online]. 2012, n.32, pp. 28-35. ISSN 2078-5593.

The challenges that face the mining and metallurgical industries are: Water, energy and feed grade. It will be necessary to develop sustainable co generation technologies in every operation. The use of robotic in mining will help to operate at very high capacities and to very low levels, diminishing risks for miners. "Advanced mineralogy", based on advanced capabilities of QEM*SCAN and MLA analyzers, coupled to ultrafine grinding technologies, produce synergy between frontier technologies. Hence, pyro and hydrometallurgical plants would again receive high grade concentrates. Extractive Metallurgy will change drastically in the future based in the dramatic technological development in communications, thanks to the microelectronic revolution. We are living at the same time in two eras: the electronic era and the knowledge era, and the impact of them in our lives are paramount. The formidable technological advances in electronics have had dramatic advances in instrumentation and process control in metallurgy. Now companies can operate at their optimum levels when they use Expert Systems which emulate expert human decision making. Metallurgy has already experienced the impact of biology and technologies such as laser, micro wave, ultrasonic, and plasma, and it is expected that they would represent many windows of opportunity in the future. According to Rupendra, the areas that would probably have higher development in the future will be: 1.     High resistance and high performance ferrous and non ferrous alloys. 2.     Increment in size, shape and resistance for pieces fabricated by powder metallurgy. 3.     Advanced structural ceramics for applications at high temperatures. 4.     Better preparation of materials methods for the extraction of ferrous and non ferrous metals. The era of nano science has been initiated, and the application of carbon nano tubes, nano sheets, and graphene coatings even in medicine. Integrated circuits using molybdenite (MoS₂) films have been created, reaching a high level of conductivity without restrictions of size, enabling to produce smaller and powerful electronic devices. The metallurgical engineer of the future, any engineer of the future, will have to deal with scales at which is advancing communication: tera scale and nano scale. He will also have to deal with complexity. When non renewable natural resources deplete, we go to complex materials, use complex processes and work on the verge of chaos. Joseph Bordogna says: "...everything reduces to manage order and disorder, everything at the same time, and if we have to put a ñame to it, it will be chaotic engineering".

Keywords : water; energy; materials; tera; nano; complexity.