Technology of mining in the future (Part3)

Technology of mining in the future (Part3)

Published by Donna Schmidt in www.miningmagazine.com

Innocule - Bhubaneswar, India

Innocule offers proprietary additives consisting of specialty chemicals and polymers to create products like dispersants, dewatering aids, flow aids, and grinding aids that are customised for customers to not only enhance productivity but also reduce ore processing costs.

With a client portfolio that includes companies like Tata Steel and UltraTech, the company's technology is quickly taking hold in the industry. It focuses on its flocculants for better thickener efficiency, dispersants for reducing alumina and silicon in iron ore, filter aids to improve pressure filter efficiency, and grinding dewatering aids to aid in boosting ball mill performance.

"High-grade ores are fast depleting and the processing plants are forced to depend on low-grade ores," Innocule said. "However, processing of low-grade ores is a challenge in the current mineral processing plants because those plants were designed for high-grade ores and low-grade ores pose many operational difficulties.

"Mineral additives are the only solution, and customized products need to be developed as per Indian requirements. Innocule has developed products that are designed to tackle operational difficulties caused by low grade feed materials."

LexSet - Brooklyn, New York, US

LexSet has created TDaaS (Training Data as a Service) using 3-D content to create photo-realistic synthetic data to train Vision AI models to enable development of improved computer vision. The approach allows users to generate limitless amounts of training data on demand.

It has brought its technology to several applications thus far, including robotics, retail inventory and restocking, supply chains and inspection drones, warehouse/ factory logistics and apps for augmented and mixed reality.

The company's technology can offer photorealistic pre-annotated rendered environments, segmentations, simulated depth maps and top-down environmental maps that customise a view with camera type, lighting conditions, occlusions and materials in a training set purposegenerated for each application.

"TDaaS has been specifically proven in making better AI vision systems for robotic object recognition and navigation, without needing photos in the training set," the company said.

"Others have tried to use generated synthetic training data to power computer vision systems, but they ran into the ‘over-fitting problem' where they taught an AI how to recognize a rendering and not real life. At LexSet, we have solved this by building our own physically accurate rendering engine, to accurately simulate real-world lighting conditions."

Lixivia - Santa Barbara, California, US

Lixivia has developed hydrometallurgical technology able to refine a large range of mineral mixtures which include low grade lime, dolime, various types of iron and steel slag, rare earth metals, and lithium. Lixivia enables partners to capture more value from their minerals.

LlamaZOO Interactive's Operations Command and Control 3D Digital Twin solution

Llamazoo Interactive - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

LlamaZoo has developed a spatial business intelligence platform that can compile data from across an operation and provide a visualisation in the context of a real-world location.

It has the capability to combine spatial data sets - LiDAR, satellite, CAD, IoT, and GIS, just to name a few - for a single unified view with analytic and visualization tools, giving operations business insights that are tailored specifically to the layout of miners' complexes.

"The mining industry specifically relies on 2-D mapping tools alongside 3-D CAD models to plan sites," the company noted.

"By better integrating various first- and third-party data sources, the LlamaZoo Spatial Intelligence Platform offers a more interactive, realistic, accurate, and fully threedimensional planning environment that allows for better decisionmaking and cost-effectiveness."

"Based on modern VR and gaming principles, LlamaZoo empowers mining companies to think and act like data companies, enabling rapid digital transformations."