New tech preventing crusher blockages on show

Technology to address oversized rock fragments causing blockages in the run of mine is being presented at the AusIMM Underground Operators Conference currently being held in Brisbane. Conference sponsor Orica’s solution to identifying oversized fragmentation was an important part in optimising the process said Senior Manager Digital Solutions David Reyes. It also tracked the origin, Mr Reyes said. “We're finally happy to launch FRAGTrack Portal, which is going to give our customers the ability to make data driven decisions, specifically on drill and blast optimization. “But most important to be able to mitigate any kind of crusher blockages, which we find today for some operations, it's almost like a sunk-cost. But once the crusher stops, that's dollars that our customers are losing. “(It means) you've got to get the rock breaker (and) if it's a big boulder, then you’ve got to get some shot firer to actually do some secondary breakage on the spot, (which means) closing the area. So it's quite a complicated piece of the puzzle. “What we’ve developed analyses the data in real time and is fast enough to send an alert either to your fleet management or to whoever is responsible for the haulage process, to be able to make a decision on the fly, whether that material needs to be taken to the secondary breakage or it can still go to the crusher.” The system which includes a binocular camera, sits outside the portal and takes into account different OEM haulage units. A machine learning algorithm then marks out the tray of the trucks, leaving only the particles to analyse using stereo-graphic modelling to detect the size of the fragmentation or the particle size distribution. The point of difference was the response and reporting times said Mr Reyes. “On the operational side of things if there was an oversize that we detect on a threshold of 900 millimeters, it will notify you in real time,“ he said. “So, we did a bit of a mix of our standard fragmentation analysis with the computing capabilities that you have today from a GPU that we have in this unit to build a smart machine learning fragmentation analysis tool. “It has a direct impact on every single truck that's coming out of the mine. And then the smarts that go behind it allow us to track it to the origin of that oversize. “One thing is to stop the oversize, what your fragmentation profiles look like, but then the next step is how do you track it back to the origin so you can actually source where the issues are coming from and then get to work on that.” Photo: Senior Manager Digital Solutions David Reyes and Senior Manager Measurements Benny Chen

New tech preventing crusher blockages on show

Industry Queensland

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