Ore flow under control - magazine.cim.org

AI desk brief

Mining technology vendors are pitching conveyor-control and material-visibility tools aimed at reducing downtime, improving throughput and cutting maintenance costs at gold operations. Schneider Electric’s Altivar Soft Starter ATS490 is being used to smooth conveyor starts/stops and support predictive maintenance, while Sachtleben Technology’s Owl Eye LiDAR platform provides near real-time volume measurement across conveyors, stockpiles and haulage routes.

The article says conveyor failures can be extremely costly, citing a gold miner that said downtime once cost $1.5 million per day. Owl Eye is described as measuring conveyor volume to within about 1% on a calibrated belt, with first Canadian deployment at Eldorado Gold’s Lamaque complex; the system can aid blending, utilization monitoring and mine-to-mill reconciliation, though it still depends on site conditions and bulk-density assumptions.