- Ore extracted from mines has to be treated in processing plants to obtain concentrates with metal contents allowing industrial use.
- Due to the changing characteristics of the ore, periodic microscopic characterization of the flows is needed to keep the plant optimized.
- Potential benefit to customers can be huge: a 1% rise in Cu recovery will increase revenue of a typical plant by several M€ per year.
- Existing solutions require highly skilled personnel, and are either slow or very costly and impose stringent infrastructure requirements.
Our system is able to perform the automated microscopic characterization of an ore through the acquisition and analysis of multispectral images of specular reflectance of a polished section by means of a fully-motorized reflected-light microscope incorporating some auxiliary elements, all of them controlled by a computer running proprietary software.
Advantages:
- Affordable to mining companies of any size
- Does not require highly specialized personnel for its operation
- Robust and portable: can be installed in a typical mine laboratory
- Unattended overnight scanning of up to 6 polished sections
- Analyzes over 1000 times more pixels than SEM-EDS in a given time
- More reliable than SEM-EDS for some types of ores, e.g. iron oxides.
