Orica (ASX: ORI) and Caterpillar Inc. (NYSE: CAT) are teaming up to improve real-time data exchange and integrate workflows across the mining value chain. The collaboration is aimed at providing customers with intelligence to improve decision-making and optimise their entire operations.
The mining industry has started to unlock the potential of combining data, sensors, and intelligence to optimise workflows for real-time decision making and value chain optimisation. Digitally integrated workflows enable customers to achieve a step change in safety, productivity, recovery and sustainability outcomes for their operations. To realise the full potential across the entire value chain, technology domain leaders, customers and academia need to increase collaboration in an open ecosystem to develop integrated, end-to-end operational workflows which link orebody intelligence, drilling and blasting, material characterisation and processing.
Cat® MineStar™ Terrain for drilling provides precision guidance to drill blasthole patterns accurately and productively. It also generates 3D geospatial data that reflect variations in rock mass hardness and fracture condition at the bench-level.
Orica and Caterpillar have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to explore opportunities to integrate key elements of their respective domains. The initial focus will be on the potential integration between Orica’s Rhino™, BlastIQ™, and FRAGTrack™ technologies with Cat® MineStar™ Terrain. The goal of this integrated workflow is to provide customers with high-fidelity rock property information enabling significant improvements to on-bench safety, drilling and blasting program accuracy and productivity, along with higher quality blast outcomes that generate enhanced mill performance.
Information can be further enriched by integrating unconfined compressive strength information produced by Orica’s drill string-mounted RHINO™ sensor.
In the future, the two companies intend to extend their collaboration to optimisation of the entire value chain, from mine to mill. This approach aligns with both organisations’ ambitions to create sustainable solutions and services that will build the momentum for more intelligent and solution-driven mining ecosystems.
Sean McGinnis, Vice President of Technology & Global Sales Support, Caterpillar commented: “Our customers are looking for every opportunity to optimise the productivity and safety of their mining and processing operations. By combining and leveraging the insights unlocked by Orica and Caterpillar’s technologies, we will be able to provide customers greater access and visibility to the data and information they need to make, better real-time business decisions.”
FRAGTrack™ Orica’s advanced vision technology when mounted on excavators and integrated to Cat® Terrain or deployed across belt conveyors, can generate accurate fragmentation size distributions for use in optimizing blast designs and outcomes, leading to improved machine productivity and enhanced mill performance.
Rajkumar Mathiravedu, Vice President of Orica Digital Solutions said: “The mining industry requires greater collaboration amongst its leading technology players to build connected workflows across different domains to address the current issue of value-leakage arising from traditional and disconnected silos. Collaborative end-to-end ecosystems are critical to harnessing the full potential of advances in sensors, data processing and intelligence to enable the development of safer, more sustainable, and productive methods of resource recovery.”
“Orica Digital Solutions is excited to be working with Caterpillar across a range of domains as we aim to better connect the digital and physical worlds to give our customers more timely and actionable insights across their value chains.”