Many industrial minerals companies face challenges in maintaining product quality because their product needs to be blended with third party additives to achieve a predictable and consistent result. The cement industry in particular struggles with the calculations required to blend the chemical characteristics and mining parameters necessary to extract material from the mine with keeping the cost of third-party additives to a minimum, and at the same time achieving product specifications and maintaining a consistent, quality product.
Frequently the calculations required to ensure product quality are completed in a spreadsheet or by guesswork resulting in excess additive cost and an increase in product variability. Dassault Systèmes has launched a solution to this issue that makes it simple to solve this complex problem.
The GEOVIA Tactical Blending solution combines Minesched’s targeted mine scheduling algorithms with SIMULIA’s Isight iterative simulation tool to optimize the right solution every time. The integrated product set compares hundreds or even thousands of blending alternatives. These consider the cost of the 3rd party additives, their chemical characteristics and the mining parameters employed to extract material from the mine. Using Monte Carlo simulation and parallel optimization techniques the Tactical Blending solution allows industrial minerals companies to save time and address uncertainty in the blending process whilst ensuring a reduction in costs and consistent quality standards. At sites where this solution has been implemented the results have yielded as much as a 76% drop in additive costs.
Charles is a Geologist with 30 years’ software experience across a range of industries from telecommunications and finance to high tech and government. Over the past nine years at Dassault Systèmes, Charles has served in several positions across GEOVIA R&D and participated in project implementations from Mongolia to India and New Zealand to South Africa. In his current role, he provides technical support to sales channels. In his spare time, he enjoys trekking and playing the grand piano.