Thursday 18 December 2014

FEI's Alan Butcher calls in

My old friend Dr. Alan Butcher, Principal Petrologist at FEI, called in today during a break from meetings at nearby Camborne School of Mines. The University has just invested in a high resolution scanning electron microscope for environmental research.



Alan was a colleague of mine at CSM. He left 16 years ago to take up a position at CSIRO in Australia, then was a leading player with Intellection until it went into receivership. Now he is FEI's most experienced mineralogist, and is looking for new areas for the commercial exploitation of rocks, particularly on the basis of their mineralogy and textures.

FEI originally specialised in automated mineralogy for mineral processing, and has always been a major sponsor of MEI's process mineralogy conferences, including last month's Process Mineralogy '14. Due to the increasing competitiveness of the minerals market, FEI has expanded into other areas, such as rocks holding oil and gas, and also into the increasingly important area of micro-computed tomography, of which Prof. Jan Miller has been a pioneer in the mineral processing sector.  We look forward to the company's sustained involvement with MEI and to news of interesting applications at Process Mineralogy '17.

1 comment:

  1. Good to see that Alan continues to be a key player in putting high-powered instruments into companies and universities where they are and will be used to their full potential. Congratulations Alan B.

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