According to Ole Knudsen, Senior Director for Digital at Weir, digital technology and innovation has risen to position number five in EY’s top 10 business risks and opportunities for mining and metals.
“As the EY report points out, mines are looking to digital solutions as a key enabler for reducing their costs while improving productivity, safety and ESG outcomes. Weir is supporting this strategic imperative by developing a holistic solution that addresses not just equipment optimisation but the optimisation of the whole flowsheet.”
Ole points out that a key challenge for digital solutions in the market is overcoming the separate and siloed functions within a mining operation. The respective decisions of the maintenance and operations teams, for instance, will impact each other in ways that are traditionally difficult to track or control.
Holistic approach
“A more holistic approach to digital solutions gives us better insights into both the impact of equipment wear on production performance, and into how changes in production affect the wear life of equipment,” he explains. Importantly, Weir’s new intelligent solution uses machine learning to generate specific recommendations in line with customer priorities.
These recommendations are based on the customer’s operating data, as well as on many years of data and modelling that Weir has collected on each product. Each customer will have their own conditions to consider and priority areas to target. While the cost of energy may be the primary challenge on one site, another might need to reduce its tailings to give the storage facility longer life.
Specific recommendations
“Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, allows us to provide customers with systems that generate specific recommendations to meet their goals,” says Ole. The value of these digital solutions has already been well proven.
Working with a copper mining customer in South America, Weir was able to facilitate important recovery improvements through digital interventions. In an operation with 12 processing lines, the recovery during the first pass was raised by 30%; this reduced the recirculating load considerably, adding to overall system efficiency.
New intelligent solution
Over the years, Weir has invested heavily in its digital tools, initially through the Synertrex intelligent platform focused on condition monitoring. The company’s digital offering has now evolved and their new intelligent solution includes AI capability which optimises on a process-level and predictive maintenance, facilitating the improvement of uptime and making maintenance more cost-effective.
Strategic acquisitions in the software and artificial intelligence (AI) space have included Motion Metrics technology, in addition to SentianAI, which uses advanced AI algorithms that continuously learn and adapt to the dynamic mine processes – thereby facilitating continuous optimisation.
“Mines are generally very rich in data, but are not always able to manage this data effectively to capture the hidden insights,” Ole concludes. “Our new holistic solution will overcome this challenge and allow mines to gain full value from the data they generate.”
Ole. What is EY and ESG? How does digital solve the problem? It is another recording device which costs more than the pump and motor to buy and install.
Get out on the plant and listen to the pump, not just press the accept button because the alarm is too noisy.
Mines are not only full of data they are dirty and wet with sludge and leached chemicals, electronics cannot handle that – in situ regular inspection required.
Sorry to seem negative but think about it.