Applied Mathematics For High Technology And Remote Sensing Applications For The Mining And Metallurgy Industries

Abstract:

Big industry production, specially in mining and metallurgy, has climbed to high volumes thanks to technical advances in automatization, chemistry and mechanical engineering, which allow the industries to operate processes that can produce hundreds and thousands of tons of product per day. These processes involve large and sophisticated equipment, and represent a high fixed cost. Optimum performance becomes an economically relevant requirement. Disruption of these processes and/or sub-optimal operation of these, even for a period of a few hours, can mean huge losses for businesses. These losses, given the high fixed costs and high production volumes justify the development of new techniques based on High Technologies for optimal management of production processes. It is the era of the technological revolution in mining and metallurgy.A team of researchers with long experience from Universidad de Chile, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and École Polytechnique of Paris, is grouped into INGMAT, to conceptualize and develop High Technology and Remote Sensing applications for mining and metallurgy industries. The scientific basis of these technologies developed by INGMAT's researchers lay in the fields of elastodynamics, electrodynamics, optics, spectroscopy, acoustics and scientific computing.Several solutions and technologies are currently conceptualized and developed by INGMAT for mining and metallurgical industry. In particular, three examples are shown: the calculation of stresses induced in rocks by mining activity (TIRAM, for its Spanish acronym), early detection of cuts in the treads of tires of mining trucks, and an airborne system for detecting objects and phenomena in the subsurface. The first one, TIRAM, is an analytical tool in the form of a software that takes mine geometries drawn using CAD techniques and computes the static induced tensions and the dynamic tensions (for simulating blasts) everywhere using novel analytical solutions for the elastic half space with compact perturbations and Dirichlet-to-Neumann operators. The second technology consists in a microwave device and an imaging technique to explore the interior of the tires of mining trucks. When small cuts appear inside the rubber and near to the internal structure of the tire it often passes unnoticed, revealing itself when the tires bursts loosing pressure. If this occurs while inside the pit, the line of trucks must be stopped and the truck with the flat tire must be unloaded with auxiliary machinery, halting the extraction process by several hours. The technology aims for detecting the cuts early during routine workshop inspections. Finally, the third technology, an Airborne Technology for the Detection and Identification of Underground Objects and Phenomena (TADI, for its Spanish acronym), consist in an airborne Ground Penetrating Radar and a novel imaging method. Its applications are wide: geological exploration, humanitarian demining, lixiviation pile inspection and early detection of uncrushables in grinding mills among others.

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