AUTOMATED INDICATOR MINERAL IDENTIFICATION: A NEW PARADIGM IN DRIFT EXPLORATION!

By Tean IOS, Wednesday, February 26, 2020

A talk at PDAC 2020, Exploration technology session,

Toronto Convention Center, Tuesday, March 3, 2:00 p.m., room 713.

https://www.pdac.ca/convention/programming/technical-program/sessions/technical-program/new-exploration-technologies

Tested, benchmarked, adopted! We talk about it since a few years. Now it’s done, it works and it’s commercially available: The ARTMin technology.

Six years of development by our R&D team lead to a technique of automated detection of indicator minerals applicable to almost any types of mineralization. Nobody argues the effectiveness of kimberlitic indicator mineral counting in glaciated terrain for diamond exploration. Furthermore, various groups are at work identifying distinctive minerals for other metallotects. However, until now, the technique was hampered by visual sorting capabilities. How can we find a useful mineral that we cannot recognize easily such as perovskite, zinc staurolite or cobaltite?

Just as we reinvented gold grain counting with our proprietary ARTGoldTM technology, we developed an automated technique capable to count grains of almost any mineral species based on their individual chemical signature. ARTMin is born, and we are sufficiently confident in its performances to launch its full scale commercialization. Recent advances in fast EDS technologies coupled with our proprietary algorithms enable the technique to compete with visual sorting in regard of speed, and thus costs. And still, compared to a fully trained mineralogist, the technique do not make mistakes, do not get tired or biased, and discriminate almost all of the 3900 mineral species recognized by the International Mineral Association including their chemical subtleties.

Introduced last June, the technique has already been used on a series of pilot exploration project, has been fully tested by global exploration companies, and recently been adopted by governmental organization for regional surveys. Be proactive, come and see at PDAC how this will change forever drift exploration!

 « There are those who follow the rules… and those who define them »

 

False colour classification of heavy mineral species, as performed by ARTMin.

 

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