Knelson Gravity Solutions is pleased to announce Mr. Luis A. Tondo of Rio Paracatu Mineraзгo (RTZ Brazil) has been selected as the winner of the highly successful "Where in the World is Knelson?" 25th anniversary contest.

Doug Corsan and Patty Moore of Knelson's Sales and Marketing team select the lucky winner of the "Where in the World is Knelson?" Internet contest under the watchful eyes of their colleagues assembled amongst various components of the world's largest centrifugal concentrator - the Knelson KC-XD70.

Mr. Tondo's entry was randomly selected from over 700 contest entrants that were received from 55 countries around the world. Knelson would like to thank all of those who entered their first-ever online contest.

"I was not expecting to be selected as the winner of the "Where in the World is Knelson?" contest, but you never win if you do not try.... it was a pleasant surprise. Now I am looking forward to checking out Knelson's latest technology," commented Luis A. Tondo when contacted and informed of his good fortune.

Knelson's latest technology refers to the crowning jewel of Knelson's 25th anniversary campaign, which has adopted the slogan "KC25: The Start of Something BIG!".

That "something big" is the introduction of Knelson's newest addition to their patented semi- continuous (batch) concentrator product line - the KC-XD70 model (figure 1 below). Standing nearly 4 meters tall, and weighing-in at over 12 tonnes, the introduction of KC-XD70 has set yet another new standard in gravity separation technology.

"We've had the XD70 project under development for the last two years," stated Doug Corsan, Knelson's VP of Sales.

"With the challenges that the gold industry has been facing over the last 4-5 years, we've seen a strong trend towards the development of big tonnage open pit deposits which has created the need for higher capacity processing equipment. When you combine this with an ever increasing number of large base metal flotation operations that are installing Knelson technology as a method of increasing by-product gold recovery, there was strong motivation to complete this project and produce the first unit," added Corsan.

"What's really exciting about this project is the fact that, in addition to becoming the world's largest centrifugal concentrator, the KC-XD70 has provided the opportunity for us to introduce a number of exciting new innovations in our patented cone technology that have been the focus of our R&D efforts for the past couple of years. We're confident that these new developments raise the bar in terms of metallurgical performance and further the application base for our technology."

Figure 1 A size comparison of the Knelson XD70 concentrator.