Optimising Automated Mineralogy for Operational Mine Site Applications

摘要

Automated mineralogy has been around for over 20 years driven by the development of QEMSCAN~R and MLA systems. These tools have the ability to provide valuable mineralogical metrics including grainsize, liberation and association statistics. The central challenge with these tools has been applying them in operational contexts with their often long run times, complexity and single point data sets of dynamic systems. Operational mineralogy is the next stage in the development of automated mineralogy with on-site analysis, faster turnarounds and streamlined mineralogical trend analysis monitoring the health and quality of the feed and process plant. However, in order for operational mineralogy to be a viable mine-site option several factors need to be optimised including sample preparation, sample analysis and data interpretation. In this paper the optimisation of sample analysis is reviewed and the core principles driving its application, are presented.