SGS has a long and established record of providing the mining industry in Canada and worldwide with cutting-edge automated mineralogy. Recently, the SGS mineralogical team at the company’s lab in Burnaby, British Columbia added a TESCAN Integrated Mineral Analyser (TIMA-X) into their in-house capabilities.
The company says this will help it continue delivering trusted automated mineralogical experience for a variety of ores (strategic metals, base and precious metals, industrial minerals and others), and other analytical techniques. The detection limits and fine textural data collection and interpretation are currently greatly improved using new advancements in automated mineralogy technology.
“Our team of mineralogical experts ensures a quality product, and offers significant interpretive value at every stage of a project. Detailed mineralogical interpretations provide both the significant input into strategic decisions, and the competitive advantage for our clients.”
TIMA-X is one of the newest and most versatile automated mineralogy systems to provide rapid quantitative analysis of samples including ores, concentrates, rocks, tailings, leach residues and smelter products.
The TIMA-X configuration uses four Energy Dispersive X-Ray (EDX) silicon drift detectors (SDD) attached to a TESCAN MIRA (field-emission gun – FEG) platform, which also includes backscattered electron (BSE) and secondary electron (SE) detectors. The full integration of hardware and software significantly enhances performance and reliability.
The TIMA-X system combines both the EDX and BSE signals to identify minerals at each measurement point (or each homogeneous segment of a grain, depending upon the analysis mode). The EDX spectra (and BSE data) are compared to entries in a mineral library on a first match principle to identify the mineral phase. Therefore, directly acquired chemical compositions of each phase, collected during the measurements, can be used for mineral assay reconciliation to ensure best in class mineral to assay data validation.
The SGS configuration of the TIMA-X software applications allows for determination of mineral concentrations, elemental distributions and mineral textural properties such as:
• Grain size
• Liberation and locking parameters
• Association and exposure
• Mineral release and predictive grad-recovery response
SGS stated: “TIMA-X introduces several novel approaches in the search for minerals of interest (bright phases search) including gold, silver, rare earths, platinum, and it is optimized to detect sub-micron inclusions and rapidly acquired low-count spectra.
Our trusted automated mineralogy and team of professionals provides significant input required for informed strategic decisions. Adding TESCAN’s TIMA-X technology enhances our current suite of SGS’ automated mineralogy capabilities in Burnaby that have been offering across Canada and worldwide. TIMA-X provides better detection limits, superior imaging and faster turn around times, and results, coupled with advanced interpretations, yield a holistic solution.”
