A team of CSIRO Future Manufacturing Flagship scientists has won a major mining industry award for the invention of the highly sensitive magnetic field sensor which sits at the operational heart of the mineral exploration tool, LANDTEM.
LANDTEM is a portable exploration tool that uses highly sensitive magnetic sensors known as SQUIDs (Superconducting Quantum Interference Devices) to differentiate the ore from other conductive material.
Led by Dr Cathy Foley (pictured here) and Keith Leslie, the team won the 2010 Australian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Mineral Industry Operating Technique Award (MIOTA) for discovering the method for making the sensor using a high-temperature superconductor.
Foley led the initial development and commercialisation of LANDTEM in collaboration with BHP Billiton and the then Canadian mining company, Falconbridge.
“LANDTEM represents a major innovation in our ability to unearth mineral deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars – deposits which may have been missed without this technology,” Foley said.
The mineral exploration tool, LANDTEM, can detect deeply buried, highly conductive massive sulphides, such as nickel. (Image above and below courtesy Outer Rim Exploration.)
LANDTEM has since been licensed to Australian startup company, Outer-Rim Exploration Services. In the past eight years, ten LANDTEM systems have been built and deployed successfully on four continents to help unearth mineral deposits worth around $6 billion.
Outer-Rim’s General Manager, Andrew Carpenter, said the LANDTEM system is an important aid to finding very conductive mineralisation in complex geological environments.
“It can detect deeply buried, highly conductive massive sulphides, such as nickel, while being able to effectively minimise the response from conductive cover and formational conductors,” Carpenter said.
CSIRO’s persistence in developing SQUIDs technology for geophysics over the past decade, and the subsequent development of LANDTEM from the laboratory to a fully functioning commercial instrument, represents a major step forward in mineral exploration technology.
LANDTEM’s development is a good example of science teams collaborating to deliver new technologies to multiple industry sectors. The underpinning SQUIDS technology – delivered through CSIRO’s National Research Flagships program – has been applied to industries as diverse as mineral exploration, oceanography, security and defence.
The MIOTA award is presented annually to a person or team responsible for an innovative cost saving or effective mineral industry operating technique developed in Australasia, in the minerals sector.
[Dr Cathy Foley’s image courtesy CSIRO.]