Innomotics is a leading supplier of motor and large drive systems and is focused on accelerating progress towards measurable and meaningful sustainable mining.

Its DigiMine portfolio of digitalisation and automation solutions for the mining industry is at the heart of its efforts to help companies enhance the productivity and efficiency of existing assets, improve safety and reduce their environmental footprint.

The DigiMine portfolio provides scope to optimise every aspect of the mining value chain, encompassing excavation, transport, beneficiation, minerals storage and handling.

YardMaster 

Yardmaster represents the most mature aspect of DigiMine and is Innomotics' application for the materials stockyard, marked by autonomous machine operation, source to destination tracking and intelligent planning.

As well as leading to safety enhancements in removing workers from a potentially hazardous area, YardMaster also leads to an average efficiency enhancement of 3%. As Innomotics' head of automation and digitalisation Leonardo Muradas explained, this can translate to significant financial benefits when one considers a single customer may account for hundreds of millions of material movements each year.

Process Twin

Process Twin is a digital simulation tool and another key component of the DigiMine portfolio. Blending the real and digital worlds, it helps customers plan and optimise operations, providing scope to minimise downtime, and reducing the need for physical prototypes.

The Process Twin tool works by simulating the main assets of the mine to establish ‘what if?' scenarios that can lead to bottlenecks being eliminated and optimised operation of those assets. For example, work around the crusher at a client's project in Chile led to very significant production gains of up to 5%.

LifeCycle

LifeCycle is based on the Siemens COMOS platform and takes care of all the control system engineering, encompassing the programmable logic controllers. With LifeCycle, commissioning times are significantly reduced, optimising the return over the huge investment made when building a mine site. Going forward, all data will be centralised here and able to be easily managed, accessed and leveraged for maintenance purposes as well, once operations start.

Pit-to-Port

Pit-to-Port is concerned with optimising operations management, so that once a mine starts operating, all production can be planned, monitored and controlled. This provides never-before-seen insights into what and how much material is being moved from the mine into the rest of the value chain for enhanced decision-making, allowing companies to decrease the amount of material in stockyards which in turn can result in significant financial gains.

Quellaveco

At Anglo American's trailblazing greenfield Quellaveco copper mine in Peru, Innomotics has been working closely with the mining major to implement its solutions in what is billed as the world's first digital mine. Here, Innomotics' technology plays a crucial role in integrating the automation and monitoring of the entire mine operation.

With a brief to integrate the full spectrum of data from extraction all the way through to shipping into a single control system, the bar was set high for Innomotics. And the challenge was made tougher still thanks to the mine existing at a remote high-altitude location in the Peruvian Andes.

The solutions implemented were Siemens plant cycle management platforms underpinned by a COMOS system. And with the supply of these systems, the objective to maximise cooperation, continuity and consistency throughout engineering and operation was achieved.

This Pit-to-Port solution has afforded Anglo American the opportunity to consolidate data from a variety of sources and so observe and measure in real-time from a remote integrated operations centre. This ensures issues have been swiftly identified and coordinated remedial action taken.

In removing silos and creating the conditions for complete transparency, DigiMine has served to unlock and demonstrate profound hidden value in what constitutes a highly complex operation with many moving parts.

Muradas explained that while not all DigiMine elements were deployed at Quellaveco and it constitutes just one of several such projects for Innomotics, the sheer scale and level of ambition associated with it ensures hugely valuable insights have been gained into customer pain points. This has directly led to the implementation of improvements to DigiMine for the benefit of all existing and future customers.

Muradas added that while DigiMine is modularised, there are nonetheless significant synergies between the different elements in the portfolio. In other words, more elements utilised equals more value unlocked and positive effects across the entire value chain. He also stressed the inherent advantages in being focused on optimising both operations and engineering, and that the two phases can and should be harmonised for best outcomes, as they were at Quellaveco.

Digital solutions for all projects

Whether in relation to a green or brownfield project, Innomotics' DigiMine portfolio has equal application and should be considered as a sustainable force for good, with solutions able to be adapted as necessary in accordance with the prevailing dynamics.

While YardMaster is already delivering automation benefits at pace and scale across several projects Innomotics is involved in, it is LifeCycle and Pit-to-Port that are the DigiMine elements Leonardo Muradas is most excited about for the future. Bringing a new-found capacity to see the big picture, they have the power to deliver profound positive sustainability-infused change for the entire mining industry.

And with hubs strategically located in Brazil, Chile, China, India and South Africa, Innomotics' DigiMine portfolio of solutions can be brought to bear upon any mining project, regardless of where it is sited in the world.