A wrap-up of the 2024-2025Metallic Student Design Competition

Thank you to all the teams who participated in the Fifth Annual SME Metallic Student Design Competition sponsored by Rio Tinto. Out of 18 teams, congratulations to the six teams (listed below in no specific order) who made their way to the second phase and competed in the “live” presentation portion in Denver, CO, during the MINEXCHANGE 2025 SME Annual Conference & Expo: Queen’s University – Gold Diggers. Universidad Nacional Mayor De San Marcos — GMM Peruvian Engineers. Missouri University of Science and Technology — Grade Getters Engineering. University of Arizona — MAGJCK Metals. Universidad Nacional de San Agustin de Arequipa — Gold Condor Planning Team. Universidad Nacional Mayor De San Marcos — SM Innovation Consulting. The Grade Getters Engineering team from Missouri University of Science and Technology, which included Garrett Bell, Patrick Hatfield, Toby Lonning, Evan Bath, Ayden Yahn and Thomas Barnes, led by Prof. Kwame Awuah-Offei, won this year’s competition. The committee thanks the judges and Mona Vandervoort for their help and contributions, and appreciates the support of the software sponsors.Tune in for the 2025-2026 Metallic Student Design Competition — registration will be starting in September. The SME Metallic Design competition is designed as a cross-disciplinary adventure for teams to simulate project work revolving around mine planning, metallurgical processing, cost estimation and environmental, social and governance considerations. For those of you who are interested or have the influence to pull together a team, the competition is geared toward evaluating a hard-rock mineral deposit and developing an economically viable process flowsheet. The competition evolves each year, bringing different deposit types and challenges to the students’ attention. Since the inaugural competition in 2020, the problem statements have involved mine plans for copper, gold, lithium and boron. The 2025-2026 competition will continue to bring new challenges and twists. Teams may consist of up to six undergraduate students (with valid SME memberships from any program on campus) including, but not limited to mining, chemical, metallurgical, geological, geotechnical engineering and any related sciences. Each participating team will have access to competition software and training, including Cost Mine, METSIM and HxGN MinePlan. During the first phase of the competition, each team member is allowed up to 30 hours over 21 days to provide a full design report with the data provided. The submitted report is reviewed by multiple well-respected industry experts who will provide comments and feedback. The top six teams will then be asked to participate in an in-person, two-day event at the MINEXCHANGE 2026 SME Annual Conference & Expo in Salt Lake City, UT. In this phase, each team is provided with additional information to elaborate on their initial design and then asked to present to a live panel of judges, where they will be judged based on their presentation skills, the ability to answer questions and their technical response to the challenge posed. Watch for emails and announcements on registration and competition information for the 2025-2026 competition. You can also email your intent to register early to Mona Vandervoort at vandervoort@smenet.org, Deniz Talan at deniz.talan@mail.wvu.edu or Miguel Pugmire at miguel.pugmire@riotinto.com. For any other information, visit the competition website at https://www.smenet.org/Professional-Development/Awards-Competitions/METALLIC-Student-Design-Competition. We look forward to all teams joining and seeing who will come out on top of the 2025-2026 challenge.

A wrap-up of the 2024-2025Metallic Student Design Competition

Authored by: Deniz Talan and Miguel Pugmire

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