Newcrest Mining has deployed Microsoft cloud, AI and IoT technologies at Australia's largest underground, block cave mine to monitor and manage crushed ore bin levels. The soft sensor delivered a return in investment within the first three months of operation. The technology, developed by Newcrest in association with Microsoft and its partner Insight Enterprises, has been rolled out at Newcrest's Cadia Valley gold mine in NSW. The challenge facing Newcrest at Cadia was managing the levels in the underground crushed ore bins. If the bins overfill, they have to be manually emptied introducing lengthy and expensive production delays.

Addressing the South Australian government's recent Copper to the World conference in Adelaide, Newcrest's chief information and digital officer, Gavin Wood, gave a rundown on what had already been achieved at Newcrest with data science, virtual and augmented reality and artificial intelligence. He also talked about the benefits delivered by crowd sourcing, although this can also create some unique challenges of its own. "If you can imagine, an experienced operator at a site being told by a university student in Argentina the answer for optimising their part of the plant is quite different to something they believe from their experience of 20 or so years. Those are real challenges for our business," Wood said. He said data science coupled with machine learning had alr...

Recently we attended the Unearthed Data Science event in Melbourne. A gold mining company -- Newcrest Mining -- provided operating data for a number of its plants, with the aim that some of the teams attending could provide useful solutions grounded in Data Science. One particular system caught our eye -- the autoclaves. This ore is rich is sulphide minerals (sulfide if you're American) such as iron pyrite (FeS2) (aka "Fool's Gold"). Sulphides inhibit the processing techniques used to extract gold from ores, so it's ideal if you can get rid of them.