ORE SORTING
A TOMRA XRT ore sorting
project at Minsur’s San
Rafael mine in Peru has
both increased plant
capacity and improved
overall recoveries at the
tin operation
“If you don’t have an orebody that has the
applicable minerals then MR is not going to be
terribly helpful,” Beal said. “Yet, it offers
incredibly precise measurements when it is
applicable.”
It does this using a conveyor belt-mounted
MRA, which uses a form of radio frequency
spectroscopy for the quantitative measurement of
target ore minerals.
Beal provides an example: “MR’s sensitivity
comes from the fact the system is 100% blind to
everything except the tuned target mineral. If we
tune it to chalcopyrite, for example, that’s all it will
ever see, but it’s able to sense this incredibly
quickly because nothing else is producing a signal
at exactly that radio frequency.”
It is this technology that enables NextOre’s on-
belt analysers to operate at mining rates of as
much as 5,000 t/h per conveyor belt with no
material preparation requirement, according to the
company. Even operating at these rates, it can
provide grade readings in seconds enabling
customised diverter gates to react in real time to
this information.
This makes it a bulk sorting solution, hence the
reason why copper and iron ores have been
configured as target minerals.
Within this same bulk sorting category is
MineSense’s ShovelSense in-pit solution.
This product uses X-ray Fluorescence
technology (XRF) to analyse the ore that comes in
contact with shovels. The ShovelSense platform
uses a combination of powerful XRF sensors,
software and proprietary algorithms to provide
real-time grade control and ore routing decisions
at the point of extraction.
This solution has been proven at Teck’s
Highland Valley Copper (HVC) operation in British
Columbia, Canada, where the miner now has three
systems up and running in the pit.
MineSense CEO, Jeff More, said Teck is moving
120,000 t/d using these ShovelSense-equipped
shovels as part of a commercial installation. In
trials at HVC, the miner said it had seen a net
“measurable increase in the amount of ore (and
the associated head grade)”.
While trials in Chile
(copper), Peru (copper-
zinc), Alaska (zinc-lead) and
Sudbury (nickel) have all
proven valuable to the
miners in question, More
stated the application of
the platform was currently
focused on these commodities as well as iron ore.
The cutoff points for the likes of TOMRA’s
sensor-based ore sorting solutions are a little
harder to ascertain as its sensor options include
Colour, Near-Infrared, X-ray Transmission (XRT),
Electromagnetic and Laser.
This combination has seen the company’s
technology prove decisive at tin, gold, rare earth,
diamond, coal, quartz, tungsten and phosphate
operations.
With this experience and the company
launching its COM XRT 2.0 units in 2018 (able to
analyse up to 400 t/h per unit with the conveyor
belt running at up to 3.5 m/s), du Preez thinks
TOMRA’s ore sorting solutions could compete with
bulk sorting products like the ones NextOre and
MineSense are delivering from a scale perspective.
“With time – and we're almost there – the
sorting technology will be so good that it will be
more economically feasible – and significantly
more accurate – to sort ore that was previously
done via bulk sorting with sensor-based sorting,"
he said.
With all these technologies, there is the
potential for effective ore sorting outside of the
‘primary’ target minerals depending on the
mineralogy of the deposit at hand. “Where there is
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MARCH 2020 | International Mining 59