Welcome to Université de Lorraine

The Université de Lorraine (UL) with its 4 Laboratories (Research center OTELo with around 420 research and technical personnel) focuses on Geosciences and the Environment. The “Laboratory GeoResources” gathers around 150 researchers and technicians in the field of Exploration, Modelling and Exploitation of mineral and energy resources. The Minerals Engineering and Processing team comprises 28 people and has more than 50 years experience in ore and waste processing, being the first research center on mineral processing in France involved in this field, since the early 1960’s.

UL has a Mineral Processing Pilot Plant (STEVAL, 2000 m2) allowing real scale tests from “kg” to “tonne” with more than 150 pieces of comminution and separation equipment, i.e. all type of flotation cell (mechanical, pneumatic, column), magnetic and gravity separators. The research centre uses texture analysers; scanning and transmission electron microscopies; 5 Raman and 8 infrared spectroscopies stations; XRD; particle size, surface hydrophobicity and electro-kinetics measurements to develop new innovation technology. L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Géologie de Nancy is the school in charge of the EMerald programme.

City

Along with its surrounding suburbs, Nancy has a population of 350,000 and is located 60km from Metz, 300 km from Paris, 100 km from Luxembourg and 140 km from Saarbrücken. Nancy has a long-standing tradition as a university town covering every discipline. There are 42,000 students, including 4,000 international students spread over the city’s universities. Nancy is also an important industrial and commercial centre.

The climate in Nancy is mildly continental with hot summers and cold winters; in January the lowest temperature is -5°C and it often snows. In July the peak temperature is approximately 30°C, respectively providing suitable conditions for various sporting activities such as winter sports in the Vosges Mountains, sailing and rowing.

The “Minerals Engineering” research team is a leader in the following ongoing large scale research projects supported in the framework of FP7 and H2020, as well as in the national and international programmes:

1. STOICISM: The Sustainable Technologies for Calcined Industrial Minerals funded by European Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7) (5.96 ME)
2. BioMore New Mining Concept for Extracting Metals from Deep Ore Deposits using Biotechnology (H2020; 8,6 ME)
3. FAME: Flexible and Mobile Economic Processing Technologies for eorppeans skarn , greisen and pegmatite ores processing funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme
4. AMIRA P9P: The Optimisation of Mineral Processing by Modelling and Simulation. A collaborative international project funded by mineral industry (University of Queensland, Australia)
5. RESSOURCES21: Strategic Metal Resources for the 21st Century funded by the French Government under the selective label “Laboratoire d’excellence”