Sorting Solutions

Sensor-based sorting company TOMRA Mining remains focused on developing new products for the diamond industry. SA Mining recently caught up with area sales manager for diamonds at TOMRA Mining, Corné de Jager, to chat about some of the latest product innovations and how these are helping miners.

How are key global trends influencing the diamond sector, and how are these, in turn, influencing product developments at TOMRA?

Global trends and recent travel restrictions have fast-tracked the need for a connection between remote collaboration and online data monitoring. TOMRA Insight is a cloud-based solution that offers customers a single secure, near real-time monitoring platform for all their sorting lines.

With a web-based interface for desktop and mobile devices, customers can access digital metrics on the status and performance of their sorters, whenever and wherever they want. The connection between sorting lines and our cloud system enables a more proactive collaboration between the customer’s staff and management, and TOMRA’s team of service experts.

TOMRA also introduced TOMRA ACT, the groundbreaking new user interface, together with a new image processing pipeline and additional process data for TOMRA Insight, enabling improvements in the overall sorting process for greater productivity and profitability.

The new enhanced Image Processing Pipeline, and additional data fed to TOMRA Insight, are now introduced on TOMRA XRT sorters and will be extended to other products.

What are some of the latest product developments from TOMRA, and will the company be launching any new products in the next six months?

The TOMRA Insight service has been very successful in the food, recycling and mining divisions. Useful features (for example, data monitoring on belt occupancy and ejected particle size distribution) are already available, but further product developments are in the pipeline that add and improve features more specific to the diamond industry.

What is the appetite for innovative technology from projects located in Africa?

Various customers have shown interest in the TOMRA ACT and TOMRA Insight upgrade packages to update previous models of its XRT sorters. TOMRA is excited to satisfy the market pull activity and help customers benefit their businesses by improving the productivity of their sorting plants and the profitability of their mining operations.

Have any of the mining companies operating in Africa recently acquired any of TOMRA’s latest products? If so, what are they being used for, and what is the success rate?

The TOMRA COM XRT 300/FR sorter completes TOMRA’s partnered diamond recovery ecosystem, which is unique in the market for offering a full recovery service from 2mm to 100mm, coupled with all the benefits of TOMRA Insight cloud computing.

This sorter is the last piece in our recovery process, covering the Final Recovery and Sort House applications to produce an ultra-high diamond by weight concentrate. It reduces hand sorting requirements and lowers security risks. It offers 100% diamond detection within the specified size fractions within 2 to 32mm and > 99% diamond recovery, guaranteed.

The TOMRA COM XRT 300/FR is the first final recovery sorter to accurately sort diamonds based on their properties and not their proxies, achieving market leading recovery with the highest recovery factor to date.

Having already successfully introduced TOMRA’s XRT technology at its Letšeng mine, Gem Diamonds purchased this groundbreaking Final Recovery solution before it was even launched. The Letšeng mine is home to the first unit to be installed in the world.

Jaco Houman, senior manager: technical and projects at Gem Diamond Technical Services, explains this decision: “We wanted to find a solution to increase our revenue from the treatment of historic material.

“We were looking for a compact machine we could use as a final recovery sorter, and the TOMRA COM XRT 300/FR performs very well in that duty, or even as a single particle sorter. Also, it is a sorter that will treat a super-concentrate and work very well as a scavenging unit.”

The final recovery sorter at Letšeng was successfully commissioned for a lower capacity and performs well. Houman says: “We are getting consistent recovery from the TOMRA COM XRT 300/FR, which is performing to our expectations from this perspective.”

Ryan Szabo, sales and project manager: diamonds at TOMRA Mining, is also pleased with the performance of the first unit installed. “The final recovery sorter has functioned exceptionally well. To date the sorter has never failed a performance test at the Letšeng Diamond Mine. It has already had successful results in the commissioning stage. In fact, it’s the most successful first implementation of a new solution that TOMRA has ever had.”

Following upstream process changes, the sorter is in the next commissioning phase to be fed at higher throughput rate, and Houman is “confident that we will be able to demonstrate performance of the final recovery sorter at the higher capacities”.