ORE SORTING equipment not in a year ’ s time , but next month . Capitalising the business to put more mobile units out in the world is a priority .”
True material characterisation
Ore sorting might be the term most associated with MineSense , but the company has been trying to show the market that its solutions encompass much more than the standard fare usually aligned with the sector .
“ The term ore sorting is most often applied to the activity of sorting further downstream on a conveyor belt and , of course , our main product , ShovelSense , provides information much earlier at the mine face ,” Jeff More , President and CEO of MineSense , told IM .
He continued : “ Once you are sorting material on a conveyor belt , your only option is to take waste out of the stream , but the much more valuable component is to recover the ore before it goes to the waste dump .”
More and his growing MineSense team are convinced the only place to do that is at the mine face with the ShovelSense system , providing real-time ore characterisation .
“ About 80 % of the profit improvement we create is recovering ore from waste , not taking waste out of the ore ,” he said .
In fact , the company – in its commercial deployments to date – is finding it can increase metal production from between 5 % and 20 % by
using the XRF-backed ShovelSense solution to recover ore from material previously classified as waste . The average to this point has been a 12 % production boost in copper terms , which is complemented by an all-important circa-10 % reduction in carbon intensity , More explained . The second reason MineSense is looking beyond the term ore sorting when marketing its solutions is the datasets it is creating for clients .
Each ShovelSense unit comes equipped with a human machine interface and proprietary algorithms that measure and report ore grade / characteristics . When combined with the BeltSense solution , mines can “ truly characterise the material ” being sensed and analysed from extraction to mineral processing for complete mine-to-mill optimisation , according to More . “ This data can be used to , for example , optimise upstream drilling or downstream
MineSense ’ s commercial ShovelSense deployments keep rising
processing ,” he said .
At some operations , this has seen the mining team create numerous stockpile feeds based on grade or other material classifications to refine and improve the consistency of the plant feed and downstream recoveries .
And the company and its data scientists have been reconciling data up- and down-stream of ShovelSense and BeltSense installations to improve recoveries in , for example , the flotation circuit to help optimise reagent use .
In the last 12 months , MineSense has continued to refine its hardware , software and AIbacked algorithms , but the biggest ‘ leaps ’ it has made are in this mine-to-mill concept , according to More .
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