Gekko has won the recent 2017 Melbourne Unearthed Hackathon at Melbourne’s General Assembly. The 54-hour open innovation event gathered software developers, engineers and designers into teams to develop prototype technologies to solve one of the four challenges provided by Newcrest.

The first prize was awarded to the Digi-MIN team which consisted of three Gekko representatives (Graduate Process Engineer Eliza Craig, Graduate Metallurgist Barry Tuncks and Mechanical Designer Matt Kurtze) and Monash University student, Daniel Bechaz. This team tackled Newcrest’s unplanned downtime and rate interruption events within its concentrators at Cadia, Australia which caused major business and safety exposures.

Gekko’s Eliza Craig explained the team approach to solve Newcrest’s challenge, “We developed a tool that flags small variations in the correlation between two related variables. We demonstrated that the correlation between two variables in the HPGR changed several times before a single downtime event and our algorithm was able to flag this more than 24 hours in advance. The algorithm is robust enough that it can easily be applied to any two related variables across any piece of equipment or site. By flagging small changes in the correlation in real time, equipment can be inspected and downtime can be planned. This can drastically reduce the cost and impact of unplanned downtime on site.”