Each year, Mining Magazine celebrates excellence in the mining industry by inviting its readers to nominate people, companies, groups or projects that they feel have demonstrated outstanding commitment to advancing the state of play in mining over the past 12 months. The shortlisted candidates are then put to the industry vote in which Orica was nominated for four entries with its market-leading digital products in four separate categories.
Orica’s Vice President of Digital Solutions, Rajkumar Mathiravedu described how Orica is continually expanding its digital solutions to support the industries rapid digital transformation across the entire mining value chain.
“Orica’s purpose is sustainably mobilise the earth’s resources and we are rapidly building a portfolio of digital technologies to augment our core explosives technologies and solutions and better serve our customers.
“This award is the recognition of the extraordinary people and partners behind these innovative digital solutions that are delivering significant value for our customer’s today.”
Software Award Winner – OREPro™ 3D
OREPro™ 3D is the industry’s first solution that optimises ore control in 3D. Using readily available input data, including the post blast topography, blast design and in-situ block model, sophisticated algorithms replicate movement dynamics throughout the entire blast and calculate SmartVectors™ that accurately transform the in-situ grade control into a post blast model.
Used by many tier-one miners around the world today, understanding where the rock mass has moved post blast is critical to separating ore and waste effectively and creating downstream efficiencies in the mining process.
Learn more about OREPro 3D™ - www.orica.com/OREPro3D
Drill & Blast Award Winner – Design for Outcome
Design for Outcome is an automated optimisation solution that sets a new benchmark for generating blast designs. It utilises machine learning algorithms and cloud-hosted processing to match rock characteristics to blast energy at high resolution to achieve targeted and consistent outcomes.
Limited solutions exist in the market that utilise data science to determine blasting designs; however they only apply a single design to all holes within a blast boundary and only Design for Outcome uses all the necessary and available data sets and also provides the data pipeline automation to produce tailored, high resolution designs in a production timescale and workflow.
Designed in collaboration with Orica’s customers, domain experts and data scientists, the technology can be used to efficiently allocate explosives energy for consistent results – reducing drill and blast costs and saving a substantial amount of time. It can also be used to tailor energy for higher downstream productivity, through optimised fragmentation as showcased in the Roy Hill deployment where they are able to target higher energy only where required, allowing drill and blast patterns and costs to be significantly reduced across the mine while maintaining benchmark excavation productivity.
Learn more about Design for Outcome – www.orica.com/DfO
Following last year’s Australian Financial Review’s Most Innovative Companies award, this achievement further reinforces Orica’s technology leadership position in the mining industry, beyond blasting.