Booster funded Mineral Screen project
EIT RawMaterials funded Timegate with a Booster-project about Analysing industrially important minerals with Timegated® Raman spectroscopy.
Mining industry has a need to identify and localize economically feasible mineral resources and separate waste rock and gangue from valuable minerals. They are lacking an effective tool for real time material analyses.
We at Timegate aim to develop novel sensing hardware tools combined with cloud-based data collection. By integrating our offering to the service ecosystem around mining companies we can help mining companies in processing and sharing of information from the mine material flows and thus help them to increase production by optimizing their mining and mineral enrichment processes.
During this Booster project, we are screened about 50 most common and important industrial minerals, both valuable and gangue, to find out detection limits of our technology with these minerals which further helps us in our service development. Based on the analyses, we had good results with apatite, hematite and spodumene. Also, gangues like talc and quartz, can be recognized well.
Implementation of the project
Professor Alan Butcher from the Geological Survey of Finland provided his expertise and consultancy to help us to identify the most important industrial minerals in the world. Based on the list we collected samples from our own mining industry network including e.g. Geological Survey of Finland and Oulu Mining School. The measured data was collected to our spectral library and the specifications for cloud-based service and data offering are defined. Furthermore, we mapped the business potential of monitoring services for certain mineral groups.
As a result of the project, we had a good understanding of industrially important minerals and the parameters for identifying them with our Timegated® Raman spectrometer.
Having the opportunity to work with the support of EIT Raw Materials Booster funding has given us a great chance to get support from the well-established mining experts and improve our understanding of the industry needs and opportunities.
