Dr Ewan Sellers

Dr Ewan Sellers has over 30 years’ experience in the mining industry combining numerical analysis and experimental work with field measurements integrated into knowledge management solutions for mining and blasting problems.

During 11 years spent at the Mining Division of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, culminating as Head of the Mining Competency Area, he managed the rock testing and instrumentation consultancy business, worked on rock mechanics aspects for improving safety in South African narrow reef mines and developed and applied instrumentation for stress measurements in underground hard rock and coal mines.

From 2005, he worked at African Explosives, starting as Blasting Scientist doing numerical modelling of blasting and subsequently led numerous projects on blast audits, explosive performance assessment, blast optimisation, wall control and numerical modelling in Africa, Chile and Indonesia. In 2010 he became Group Manager Blasting Science and from 2012 he was Group Manager Mining Optimisation at AEL Mining Services in Johannesburg.

At JKTech he was Principal Mining Engineer and Manager of the Integrated Solutions team working on Mine to Mill value optimisation projects to increase productivity of mining operations. Other focus areas were improving production and limit blasts to reduce operational risk, improve plant throughput and development of site teams for sustainable operations, Big data analytics for blasting, load and haul, mineral processing. During 2015 he was seconded to the Rio Tinto Mining Excellence Centre as Technical Analytics Specialist – blasting, load and haul.

Dr Sellers has written over 60 technical conference and journal papers as well as numerous consultancy reports covering numerical models for soil, rock failure and fracture, seismology, acoustic emission, laboratory testing, in-situ stress measurements, optimisation of blasting in theory and practice, and mine-to-mill value chain optimisation.

MINING OPERATIONS, REGIONS AND TECHNOLOGY:
• Surface open pit, strip mining and quarrying,
• Underground narrow reef, room and pillar, long hole, block and sublevel caving, open stoping
• Rock Engineering, Blasting, Wall Control, Mine to Mill, Process improvement, Value chain optimisation
• Gold, coal, platinum, aggregate, lime, copper, diamonds, iron ore, manganese, silver/lead/zinc
• Africa, Australia, South East Asia, Chile, Middle East
• Numerical modelling, Big Data Analytics, Remote Operations, Software Commercialization
• Stress measurement, Laboratory testing, Vibration monitoring, High speed video, Infrared