The Crush It! Challenge spearheaded by the federal government (Impact Canada), in cooperation with Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) CEMI, and Goldcorp was created to challenge the mining industry to reduce the amount of energy that crushers and grinders used in the mining process. These pieces of equipment account for upwards of 50 per cent of mine site energy consumption and up to 3 per cent of all the electric power generated in the world.
The federal initiative is called the “Crush It! Challenge” (web site is https://impact.canada.ca/en/challenges/crush-it).
iRing Inc. is the lead partner and has coordinated the effort with proposal partners to respond enthusiastically to the Crush It! Challenge says a news release.
Essentially the team proposes to bring together the processes and technology that could reduce or even eliminate the need for expensive primary crushers, and reduce the energy required by secondary crushing (potentially eliminating it as well) and grinders in both mines and quarries globally.
The competition has several qualifying rounds, and if successful in getting to Round 3, then the team will be eligible to receive $800,000 in seed funding to further prove the concept over a 1.5-year period. At the end of that period, if the team wins the chance to move forward, the project would be eligible to receive an additional $5 million in funding to commercialize the products and concepts.
The Paradigm Shifters team consists of the following companies:
- iRing Inc. (North Bay) Challenge Project Lead – Drill and blasting software.
- Nexco Inc. (North Bay) – Producer of the energy-variable explosive product.
- Boart Longyear (North Bay and global) – Global supplier of market leading drilling products and services.
- Paige Engineering Limited (PEL) (North Bay) – Design and fabrication of explosive manufacturing and loading equipment
- Seneca (Montreal) – Explosive plant engineering, design and build.
- Maptek (Denver and Global) – 3D laser scanner/fragmentation measurement capabilities.
- Bomon Capital (Toronto) – Long term financing should the team succeed.
The savings that could accrue to mines and quarries annually is $12.8 (25% reduction) to $25.6 (50% reduction) billion. If all mines in the world adopted this solution it would represent a reduction equivalent to 7 to 13% of all the carbon released in Canada, and 20 to 41% of Canada’s contribution to meeting the Paris Accord agreement.
iRing will use its software, Aegis, to design the blasting patterns based on the fragmentation requirements. Boart Longyear will deploy recently developed high-speed diamond drilling technologies and instrumentation solutions, to quickly and accurately drill and validate high-quality blast holes, while utilizing significantly less energy. Boart Longyear’s drills utilize drilling data logging to interpret rock density and strength etc. while drilling. With Seneca’s help, Nexco will build a demonstration plant that will produce an energy-variable explosive mixture that can be fueled while being loaded into the blast holes, and the blast energy would be based on the ore strength information provided by the Boart Longyear’s drills and iRing’s software. Troy Williams, Vice President of Development of iRing states “The challenge will provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reach the mining industry and demonstrate that it is possible to produce consistent results from the blasting operations.”
Paige Engineering Ltd will design and fabricate the explosive manufacturing and loading equipment required to change the explosive’s energy during loading. Energy reduction is done by adding additional water content into the explosive formulation during loading. Maptek’s laser scanner will be used to verify fragmentation results by scanning the muck pile and producing a 3D point cloud which can be analyzed for a measured fragmentation distribution with those results used by Aegis to further calibrate the fragmentation models.
Mark Sherry, President of iRing states “We are really excited by this opportunity as it is directly in iRing’s wheelhouse. The Paradigm Shifters bring together the best in the industry when it comes to drilling and blasting. By working together, we will create a paradigm that is more efficient, effective, cleaner, and safer”.
