PERTH - Diversified giant Rio Tinto on Tuesday reported it would further its Mine for the future programme by developing and testing technologies in underground tunneling and mineral recovery.
The miner is expanding trials of new shaft and tunnel boring systems, targeted at significantly lowering the time taken up excavate underground, using the announcement of your second tunnel boring trial.
Rio is doing work in partnership with Atlas Copco for the trial, that will start in 2013 for the Kennecott Utah copper mine near Salt Lake City, the united states.
The Atlas Copco tunnel boring system at Kennecott Utah is anticipated to allow Rio Tinto to tunnel greater than 10 m every day - nearly twice the interest rate of fliers and other modes.
high pressure grinding mill
The first tunnel boring trial would can start the Northparkes copper-gold mine in New South Wales, Australia, this season. Locations were currently being considered for a shaft-boring system trial, said Rio's head of innovation, John McGagh.
"More mining is moving underground as deeper orebodies are identified and openpits arrive at the end of their lives. Constructing underground mines can be technically challenging, expensive plus a slow process," said McGagh.
"These trials mean we can easily test the technology to allow us to mine deeper plus much more safely, together with the potential benefits of greater efficiency and speed of underground mine construction, which would increase the worth of the projects quarry plant."
Meanwhile, the mining giant has also been working on ways of improving rates of ore recovery from mature and complex deposits.
As part of the mineral recovery programme, Rio was taking its cue from nonmining industries from the development of mineral sorting technology by forging a partnership with global automated sensor-based systems supplier TOMRA Sorting Solutions, to cultivate commercial-scale systems for separating minerals from rock waste.
The work would include scaling up Rio's iron-ore and copper sorting technologies, which extract saleable ore from waste rock, to sort around 1 000 t/h of rock.
Rio seemed to be partnering with UK-based e2V to build up machines to boost the efficiency of mineral recovery from previously discarded ore. The machinery uses large-scale microwave and radio frequency generators and it's expected to set a new world standard in mineral recovery.
The partnership would enable Rio to scale up its mineral recovery technologies for instance Copper NuWave, that is expected to be trialled later in 2010 at Kennecott Utah.
"We are developing machines which use digital and sensing technologies to detect and separate the mineral from rock waste so that we can improve rates of recovery from what exactly is currently being treated as waste rock. Fraxel treatments has the capability of being a potential game-changer inside the mining industry," said McGagh.
"There is increasing minerals demand world wide - especially from emerging markets. As minerals become harder to mine quarry artificial sand making machine, from deeper mines in remote areas, it's innovation from modern science and technology that's the key to meeting this matter in a safe and environmentally-friendly way."
On Monday, Rio Tinto announced it truly is investing $518-million on a long-distance heavy-haul rail network in Wa. This driverless train formed section of the AutoHaul programme under its Mine for the future initiative.
No comments:
Post a Comment