NextOre adds underground load and haul to magnetic resonance analysis offering
The next iteration of NextOre’s magnetic resonance (MR) sensor technology has come to light, with the company revealing details about a solution meant for the underground loading and haulage space.
The New South Wales-based company made its name installing MR sensors above conveyor belts, proving its analysis and sorting capabilities out in, among others, a 6,500 t/h conveyor application being used for data reconciliation in Chile, and a sorting application on a 2,800 t/h installation at First Quantum Minerals’ Kansanshi copper mine in Zambia.
MR technology comes with no material preparation requirement and provides grade estimates in seconds, NextOre claims. This helps deliver run of mine grade readings, providing “complete transparency” for tracking downstream processing and allowing operations to selectively reject waste material.
Its open geometry (OG) sensor developments have also come into view over the last few years, with a 3-m-wide unit developed by CSIRO to be used in a material feeder setup being developed in 2022 and, later, a 7-m-wide (OG7) sensor undergoing successful field testing at a large copper mine in Africa.
Its latest advances involve the 3-m-wide unit CSIRO initially developed, but in an underground mining scenario.
Chris Beal, CEO of NextOre, shared details of this plan with IM last year, and the company is now in a position where it could be shipping a unit from its New South Wales base to a mine in the state later in 2025.
Upgrades to the hardware – mainly focused on streamlining truck alignment and scan time, as well as ruggedising the sensor for an underground setting – and the addition of user-friendly software has led to a sensing unit able to measure the average grade of up to 50 t of material on a truck tray in 20-60 seconds.
“The higher the grade the material is, the shorter the analysis time,” Beal explained. “The closer the grade is to zero, the longer the duration required for scanning.”
The OG3 is still very much a prototype, but Beal already has an eye on commercialising it.
“The miners want to know that setting the unit up is going to be straightforward and quick, that it isn’t complex to operate, and that the analysis process is fast,” he said. “We have had this in mind with all the work we have been doing.”
The initial application is likely to be for 30-50-t mine trucks given the size of the sensor, with Beal saying the most likely first adopter has recognised that such analysis could potentially reduce the number of truck loads transported from the bottom of the mine to the top as well as the number of truck loads transported from a satellite orebody to a centralised processing plant, among other benefits.
He also sees potential for having the sensor monitor LHD bucket loads in the right application.
“To be able to suspend this sensor in something like a cuddy that has available overhead space where a bucket could be positioned underneath, check the grade, and then carry on doing what it’s doing could be a powerful implementation,” he said.
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