Building on many years of developing and incorporating digital tools, Weir is well placed to deliver a more holistic solution for driving continuous plant optimisation. Ole Knudsen, senior director for Digital at Weir, explains why this is a gamechanger in the digital journey for mining.
According to Knudsen, this is a natural step in the company’s digital journey, building on years of strategic investment in developing new technologies. Knudsen highlights that 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,” he says. “Weir is supporting this strategic imperative by developing a holistic solution that addresses not just equipment optimisation but the optimisation of the whole flowsheet.”
He 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.
“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 says. Importantly, Weir’s new intelligent solution uses machine learning to generate specific recommendations in line with customer priorities.
Weir’s Director of Digital Product Strategy, King Becerra, highlights that 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. Becerra emphasises that 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.
“Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, Weir can provide customers with systems that generate specific recommendations to meet their goals,” he says. 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.
Over the years, Weir has invested heavily in its digital tools, initially through the Synertrex intelligent platform focused on condition monitoring. Weir’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,” concludes Knudsen. “Our new holistic solution will overcome this challenge and allow mines to gain full value from the data they generate.”
