Digging deep to dig better: Smart mining’s digital tools

Posted: November 05, 2024

Since the advent of mining—which predates recorded history (scientists have carbon-dated the earliest known mine to 41,000 BCE)—miners have been searching for ways to improve extraction processes.

For example, while many remember the Roman Empire for political and social institutions, roads and aqueducts, and military strategies and conquests, the miners of Rome also invented new extraction techniques: hushing and fire-quenching.

Hushing involves flooding mines with large volumes of liquid to wash away soil and reveal the resources beneath. Fire-quenching, on the other hand, uses liquid to crack heated rocks. By rapidly cooling the stone, the process causes the rocks to fracture, exposing valuable metals for extraction.

How is the mining industry driving innovation?

A lot of things have changed since the days of Caesar, but the mining industry’s insatiable drive to optimize extraction isn’t one of them. Mining companies continue to innovate new tools and techniques at breakneck speed.

The latest leap forward in innovative mining tech. comes in the form of intelligent drills, like the Sandvik DD212i produced by Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions. Often equipped with intelligent drilling controls, narrow vein carriers, and instrumented booms, intelligent drills use analytics suites and intuitive user-interfaces to give operators real-time information, making them particularly well-suited for mines with challenging, deep, and narrow orebodies.

Intelligent drills like Sandvik’s allow for faster penetration rates, reduced parts costs, and an overall lower cost of ownership. Operators can gain extensive experience through Sandvik’s Digital Driller simulator, designed specifically for training DD212i operators. The simulator allows for quick, effective training—and increasingly vital tool for improving operators’ skillsets, efficiency, and performance, as the industry stares down the labor cliff.

How is the mining industry using AI?

Innovation, it seems, runs through miners’ veins. And in 2024, that instinct to optimize goes well beyond novel extraction tools like Sandvik’s revolutionary new drill. AI-powered advanced analytics, digital twins, industrial data infrastructures that give miners pit-to-port operational visibility—the list goes on and on.

As mining operations look to meet increasing demand for rare earth elements and minerals vital for batteries and other green energy technologies, a fresh wave of innovation around intelligent mapping techniques is also gathering momentum—a wave that surely hasn’t crested yet. New research, published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, details one such cutting-edge geospatial mapping technique.

Predicting the shapes of ore veins is as difficult as it is important, as mining companies look to improve extraction precision and reduce waste across the board. Researchers proposed and tested a geographically neural network-weighted logistic regression to map areas with mineral potential. Their predictive model, which combines spatial patterns with neural networks, not only seems to make accurate predictions but also may help explain the factors behind mineralization in complex areas.

In a gold prospecting test researchers conducted in Nova Scotia, the model performed better than other advanced models, showing a 5% to 16% improvement in accuracy—an innovative approach that can detect new patterns and is highly effective for solving classification problems in complicated spatial environments.

What’s next for the mining industry?

While there’s really no telling what innovative tools and solutions miners will devise next, one thing is sure—The mining industry will continue embracing intelligent digital solutions to tackle complex operational challenges. The integration of automation, AI-driven analytics, predictive spatial modeling, and advanced training tools will continue allowing mining companies to improve productivity, reduce costs, and maintain a competitive edge as the industry transforms in lockstep with the green energy transition. No doubt as more companies turn to AI and digital solutions, miners will continue to break new ground.