Argyle Diamond Mine is one of Australia’s most iconic and celebrated mines. The AK1 diamond deposit is among the world’s largest and mine-life has been recently been extended to at least 2019. In Argyle’s past, a complex in-house delay accounting system provided valuable insight into variety of maintenance and operating issues that the plant encountered. However, as times changed, key personnel responsible for maintaining the in-house delay accounting system departed, and the unsupported system could no longer meet the Process Department’s needs. After assessing a variety of options, Argyle determined that’s its needs would be best met by a new product, RtDuet. Implementation of production software was a new experience for the site Metallurgy team who were forced to overcome a variety of challenges. After implementation and revision RtDuet emerged as a source of high quality data for the process plant, and is used by the Metallurgy and Reliability teams to identify maintenance issues and potential areas of improvement. With ongoing support from RtTech our delay accounting system continues to improve as new features are developed and rolled out. Features in development include highly desirable additions such as Auto-entry, new user interface, Integrated MS-SQL reporting and AF 2.4 Integration.
Speaker
Russell Shedden
Russell graduated with a Minerals Engineering/Commerce double degree at Western Australian School of Mines in 2008, and during 2010 and 11 was a Graduate Metallurgist at Argyle Diamonds. In and is now the Plant Metallurgist.