LIBS CHEMICAL SENSING APPLICATIONS IN THE MINING AND MINERALS INDUSTRY

The mining industry is faced with an increasing scarcity of natural resources. At the same me, the global demand for resources keeps growing and the requirement to reduce the environmental footprint of mining becomes more important. This creates the need to develop innovave soluons that increase the efficiency and sustainability of mining natural resources.

Mining operaons deal with huge quanes of excavated material with varying mineral concentraons and economic value. Increased knowledge about the composion of this material provides opportunies to improve decision making for stockpiling, sorng, and mineral processing. However, no systems currently exist that can be used to measure the chemical composion of large material quanes in real-me. LIBS chemical sensor technology provides a soluon, because no sample preparaon is required and measurements can be performed at relavely high speeds.

At SPECTRAL Industries we work together with the mining industry to develop LIBS-based sensor applicaons for the mining environment. Examples of applicaons are inline conveyor belt analysis, scanning exposed rock surfaces (see Figure 1) and scanning drill chips from blasthole drilling. Addionally, we also work on applicaons that improve the exploraon for new mineral deposits such as the scanning of drill cores (see Figure 2). We develop the best LIBS sensor for a specific applicaon using our in-depth experse of lasers, spectrometers and data processing.

One of the major challenges of using LIBS for characterizing the mineral quanty in rocks is the heterogeneity of this material. Rocks are composed of many different minerals with various grain sizes. Each mineral consists of several different elements and for some minerals the relave quanty of these elements can vary. Depending on the size of the mineral grains, a single LIBS measurement can represent one or several minerals. Development of advanced data processing techniques is therefore required in order to provide quantave composional informaon that meets the required accuracy. Addionally, calibraons need to be tailored to the geological seng of a specific mineral deposit to take all the variaon between rock types and mineralogy into account.

The results obtained using LIBS chemical sensing on ore samples from acve mining operaons show that LIBS can be used to provide the informaon that is needed to improve the efficiency and sustainability of future mining.

SPECTRAL Industries is a new chemical sensor developer and manufacturer, with a focus on applicaons in the mining and minerals industry. SPECTRAL's chemical sensors are robust, mobile & fast: they can be applied on (fast) moving raw material. The sensor features our unique IRIS spectrometer with world-class signal-to-noise (S/N) rao, rugged pulse laser source and highly efficient opcs. The design allows for flexible integraon into industrial equipment and can be mounted in any orientaon. Suitable for a wide range of environmental condions, it offers low maintenance cost and improves processes by delivering real-me informaon. SPECTRAL delivers its unique sensor systems for the following applicaons: • Drill core scanning • Rock surface mapping • Drill cungs analysis • Ore, concentrate and slag characterizaon • Muck pile characterizaon

The LIBX sensor can be applied for automated ore sorng, that separates valuable from non-valuable rocks to prevent unnecessary cost for processing worthless ore and maximize return on investment. The technology is highly scalable as the hardware is suitable for any type of ore and materials.

Example of part of the output of a drill core scan (warmer colors are higher concentrations)

maas@spectral-i.com