This illustration, released by Atlas Copco in mid-2010, portrays an early-stage stylized image of a Mobile Mining
Machine concept under study by the Swedish equipment supplier as part of Rio Tinto’s Mine of the Future program.

At the company’s Kennecott Utah Copper mine near Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, Rio Tinto is working in partnership with Atlas Copco on a trial of a tunnel-boring system that is expected to allow the company to tunnel more than 10 m per day, nearly twice the rate of conven-tional methods. This work is scheduled to begin in 2013 and is addition to a first tunnel-boring trial, run in partnership with Aker Wirth, that will begin this year at the company’s Northparkes copper and gold mine in New South Wales, Australia. Rio Tinto is also considering locations for a shaft-boring system trial.

As part of its work to improve rates of ore recovery from mature and complex deposits, Rio Tinto has formed a partner-ship with a Norwegian company, TOMRA Sorting Solutions, to develop commer-cial-scale systems for separating miner-als from rock waste. This work will include scaling-up of Rio Tinto’s iron ore and copper sorting technologies, which extract saleable ore from waste rock, to sort up to 1,000 mt of rock per hour.

Rio Tinto is also partnering with UK-based e2V to develop machines to improve the efficiency of mineral recov-ery from previously discarded ore. The machinery uses large-scale microwave and radio frequency generators and is expected to set “a new world standard” in mineral recovery.

Rio Tinto Head of Innovation John McGagh said, “We are developing machines that use digital and sensing tech-nologies to detect and separate the miner-al from rock waste so that we can improve rates of recovery from what is currently being treated as waste rock. This technolo-gy has the capability of being a potential game-changer in the mining industry.”

Rio Tinto is also continuing work on the development of the VK1airborne grav-ity gradiometer, an exploration tool that detects small changes in the earth’s grav-itational field the can indicate the pres-ence of mineral deposits. The first com-plete system was initially flown in August 2010, and several test flights were made 2011. A second, improved system was constructed in 2011 and has begun flight testing near Perth, Western Australia. Rio Tinto’s 2012 plan is to extend the test flight program to the Pilbara region of Western Australia, once the system approaches target performance.