A ruggedized instrumentation and desktop DAQ suite engineered for severe mineral processing environments, continuously acquiring over 20 concurrent process parameters to deliver real-time metallurgical visibility and tamper-proof run records.
The Challenge
Mineral beneficiation, crushing, and extraction plants are notoriously hostile to sensitive electronics—plagued by heavy dust, vibration, electromagnetic interference, and moisture. Optimizing recovery rates and protecting downstream mills requires tracking complex, interconnected variables—including multi-zone bearing temperatures, slurry density, feed rates, vibration frequencies, fluid pressures, and power draw. Relying on disconnected analog meters or manual clipboards leaves metallurgical engineers blind to sudden feed surges and mechanical wear, risking unpredicted equipment teardowns, ore grade loss, and untraceable processing runs.
What We Built
We engineered a complete, two-tier data acquisition solution: an industrial field instrument deployed directly at the ore processing point paired with a centralized desktop monitoring and analytics suite. The field hardware interfaces with diverse analog, RTD, digital, and bus-connected transducers, filtering noise and aggregating 20+ critical operational variables simultaneously. This telemetry streams deterministically into the desktop control application, which visualizes live metallurgical curves, monitors alarm thresholds, and commits every processing batch into an immutable, searchable database.
Key Capabilities
- Dense 20+ Parameter Multiplexing: Synchronous sampling across thermocouple/RTD arrays, 4–20 mA transmitters, load cells, vibration sensors, and digital inputs across mechanical and metallurgical domains.
- Hardened Field Signal Conditioning: High-isolation analog front-ends designed to suppress plant-floor electrical noise, grounding loops, and transient voltage spikes common in heavy mining machinery.
- Dynamic Desktop Analytics Console: High-contrast desktop UI rendering live multi-parameter trendlines, process flow mimic diagrams, and sub-second anomaly highlights.
- Predictive Anomaly & Overload Interlocks: Real-time software limit checks that flag thermal spikes, slurry line pressure drops, or motor overload states before equipment damage occurs.
- Batch Traceability & Run Archival: Automatic batch indexing that binds all 20+ parameters to feed batch numbers, operator IDs, and shift timestamps, exporting clean, audit-ready CSV, Excel, and compliance reports on test completion.
Outcome
Turned a chaotic extraction environment into an organized, deterministic data pipeline. Plant engineers and metallurgists gain complete real-time visibility into machine stress and ore processing consistency, drastically reducing unplanned downtime and securing a 100% auditable record for every single run.