Elephant Curve Animation: an adaption of a classic chart showing mineral processing challenges and advances

We’re happy to share a short animation of the classic ​‘Elephant Curve’ graph with our community.

The animation helps ​‘brings to life’ how science-based innovations are improving mineral particle recovery, and ​‘lifting the trunk’ of the elephant on the graph.

Thanks to, and acknowledging the efforts of our University of Melbourne-based team, we’re happy to on-share a short animation of the ​‘Elephant Curve’ with our community. Feel free to use this graphic, noting source as COEMinerals.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Enabling Eco-Efficient Beneficiation of Minerals (COEMinerals) is improving recovery of fine and coarse mineral particles, helping to facilitate the Centre aims of reducing energy and water used in mineral processing, as well as improving recovery of valuable resources.

Some context on the graphic and the animated version:

* The animated version we share here was created by our University of Melbourne team using Grok (AI program) — hereby acknowledging your talent and creativity of our PhD student Tareq Mohammed Al-Shami

* The Elephant Curve (adaptation) is well known to, and well-used in, the mineral processing industry — you’ll find it in many papers, posters and presentations showing particle recovery, and particle losses, during mineral separation processes

* We know that the ​‘elephant curve’ was shared by Gerald Luttrell at Virginia Tech as part of his Mining and Minerals Engineering teaching, and was published in papers in 2018 (Improving coarse particle flotation using the HydroFloat™ (raising the trunk of the elephant curve); Improving fine particle flotation using the StackCell™ (raising the tail of the elephant curve)). Students and organisations refer to it today too

* Originally known as the Lakner-Milanovic graph, or the global growth incidence curve, the elephant analogy on a graph was first used to illustrate the unequal distribution of income growth for individuals belonging to different income groups (2013)

If you know more about the history of the elephant curve — we’d love to know! Please contact us via the email link on our website www​.coem​iner​als​.org​.au