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United States Bureau of Mines
Industry: Mining
Number of terms: 33118
Number of blossaries: 0
Company Profile:
The U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM) was the primary United States Government agency conducting scientific research and disseminating information on the extraction, processing, use, and conservation of mineral resources. Founded on May 16, 1910, through the Organic Act (Public Law 179), USBM's missions ...
A general term including both diatomaceous earth (diatomite) and radiolarian earth (radiolarite).
Industry:Mining
A general term indicating that water is the medium used to assist in filling the voids between mineral fragments and to improve compaction.
Industry:Mining
A general term indicating the effective size at which separation has taken place, calculated from a size analysis of the product; commonly expressed as either partition size or equal errors size.
Industry:Mining
A general term referring to any of the ells, tees, various branch connectors, etc., used in connecting pipes.
Industry:Mining
A general term relating to explosives in which a principal constituent, nitroglycerin, is given a gelatinous consistency by mixing it with nitrocotton.
Industry:Mining
A general term relating to explosives of the gelatin type in which there is a proportion of wood, metal, and oxygen-containing salts.
Industry:Mining
A general term that includes all refractories of the fireclay, sillimanite, mullite, diaspore, and bauxite types.
Industry:Mining
A general term that includes joints, cleavage, faults, bedding planes, and other surfaces of separation.
Industry:Mining
A general term that refers to a mass mining system where the extraction of the ore depends largely on the action of gravity. By removing a thin horizontal layer at the mining level of the ore column, using standard mining methods, the vertical support of the ore column above is removed and the ore then caves by gravity. As broken ore is removed from the mining level of the ore column, the ore above continues to break and cave by gravity. The term "block caving" probably originated in the porphyry copper mines, where the area to be mined was divided into rectangular blocks that were mined in a checkerboard sequence with all the ore in a block being removed before an adjacent block was mined. This sequence of mining is no longer widely used. Today most mines use a panel system, mining the panels sequentially or by establishing a large production area and gradually moving it forward as the first area caved becomes exhausted. The term "block caving" is used for all types of gravity caving methods. There are three major systems of block caving, and they are differentiated by the type of production equipment used. (1) The first system based on the original block cave system is the grizzly or gravity system and is a full gravity system wherein the ore from the drawpoints flows directly to the transfer raises after sizing at the grizzly and then is gravity loaded into ore cars. (2) The second system is the slusher system, which uses slusher scrapers for the main production unit. (3) The last system is the rubber-tired system, which uses load-haul-dump (LHD) units for the main production unit. Block caving has the lowest cost of all mine exploitation systems, with the exception of open pit mining or in situ recovery.
Industry:Mining
A general term, for use in the field, to designate any coarse-grained, holocrystalline igneous rock almost entirely composed of amphibole minerals.
Industry:Mining