FEI
Company (Nasdaq: FEIC), world's premiere provider of electron and ion-beam
microscopes for nanoscale research and manufacturing across many industries,
today announced it has acquired the Mineral Liberation Analysis business of
JKTech Pty Ltd, the technology transfer company for the Julius Kruttschnitt
Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC) and other Centres of the Sustainable Minerals
Institute (SMI) at The University of Queensland.
"FEI and JKTech have been technology partners for more than ten years—delivering
MLA™ solutions to major natural resource companies and universities around
the world," said Dr. Paul Scagnetti, FEI's Industry Division vice president
and general manager. "This acquisition follows our recent acquisition of
the QEMSCAN® solution and the assets of Intellection, the other major force
in automated mineralogy, giving FEI a leadership position in this market."
"We're pleased by FEI's commitment to take MLA to the next level,"
said Dr. Geoff Gault, JKTech Managing Director, "The resources and capabilities
that FEI is putting into automated mineralogy should have a substantial positive
impact on the ROI of natural resources companies around the world. The MLA technology
has been rapidly adopted by the world's leading mining companies, giving credit
to the MLA inventor Dr Ying Gu."
Automated mineralogy systems identify minerals in polished sections of drill
core, cuttings, particulate, or lump materials, and quantify a wide range of
characteristics, such as mineral abundance, grain size, porosity/permeability
and liberation. These geological properties drive business decisions in natural
resource recovery operations such as mining, mineral processing and oil &
gas drilling, making MLA and QEMSCAN invaluable to geophysicists, geologists,
mineralogists and metallurgists who engage in process optimization, feasibility
studies and particle characterization analyses.
Dr. Ying Gu, the inventor of MLA, will join JKMRC and will continue to do research
in the field of mineralogy. FEI will maintain an office in Brisbane, Australia,
which will serve as the Center of Excellence for Natural Resources. QEMSCAN
and MLA experts from the former Intellection and JKTech MLA businesses are joining
FEI natural resources experts at that office to deliver world-class customer
support services and to expand product development.