PI Coresight was renamed PI Vision in 2017
Aurelia Metals Limited (AMI) is an exploration and mineral development company based in Orange NSW, Australia. The Company's focus is the development and ongoing exploration of the Hera-Nymagee Project, which consists of a high-grade gold, silver lead zinc polymetallic deposit.
The Hera Processing Plant embarked upon a process optimisation campaign to improve productivity and reduce costs. Previously, process data to identify and quantify opportunities was not readily available and was distributed across a number of sources including Citect and a range of discrete laboratory reports. Some of the goals of the optimization project, include:
- cyanide reagent control
- trending of key processing data for stability
- Improving process control in those key areas where stability is critical
To establish a foundation for data-driven process optimization, Aurelia installed the PI System including Asset Framework, PI Web API and PI Coresight. Peter Smith, Senior Metallurgist and Convergio will describe some of the immediate benefits, including uploading daily laboratory assays, trending key plant data over long and short intervals and enabling support capability for off-site personnel. The talk will also address how the PI System helped resolve typical issues associated with multiple users entering data into multiple spreadsheets (i.e. “Excel Hell”) and significantly reduce manual data “hunting and gathering and how the project contributed to an improvement in plant recovery (i.e. more metals are extracted from the same amount of ore), with additional benefits realized in reduced reagent consumption.
Speaker
Peter Smith
Peter has been working in the mineral processing industry as a metallurgist since 1992. His experience includes 15 years in gold processing by CIP and 5 years producing manganese sulphate monohydrate by sulphur dioxide leaching of manganese dioxide. His current role at Aurelia involves process optimisation of a polymetallic gold silver lead zinc operation including gravity recovery, intensive cyanidation, flotation, high intensity cyanide leaching of concentrate (~3500ppm CN) and Merrill Crowe. Prior to joining Aurelia Metals as the Senior Metallurgist, he was Processing Manager for Barrick at the Plutonic Gold Mine in Western Australia.Peter holds a Bachelor of Science (Extractive Metallurgy) from Murdoch University and a Graduate Diploma in Education from the University of Western Australia. Peter is a Chartered Professional Metallurgist with the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (CP Met AusIMM).