History of Automated Mineralogy

the term automated mineralogy was coined only recently in the early 2000s by the first two companies to commercialize the technique, jktech and intellection however, the first application of this technique had been developed by csiro, australia's government research organization, in the early 1970s the first publication on the use of a computer system to control both the scanning electron microscope and the x ray acquisition was in 1975 by dr alan reid and his team (reid et al , 1975) with the aim being to automate the process of acquiring x ray data for phase identification, which had been a manual process requiring a large amount of a skilled sem operator time at this time the process and technique was referred to as quantitative evaluation of minerals by scanning electron microscope, and given the acronym qem sem dr reid's research team continued to develop the software interface with support from some of the largest mining companies from around the world, including rio tinto and anglo america over the next 20 years his team continued with the original qem sem philosophy of maximizing the number of x ray point being collected to best quantify the sample it was during this time dr paul gotlib progressive took over the research group, and dr reid retired from csiro during this development period a new face was introduced into the group by the name of dr ying gu, and he had a belief that the high resolution bse image collected could provide much more textural information and advocated for a change of the qem sem philosophy to reduce the number of x rays, as x ray detector system at the time were much slower ln2 cooled sili detectors due to the schism between these two philosophies ultimately saw dr ying gu leave the csiro qem sem team, and joined queensland universities jkmrc research center, where he continued to develop his concept this culminated in the first paper published on a working system in 1997 by ying and napier munn (ying et al , 1997) the software package developed was given the name mineral liberation analyzer, and abbreviated to mla csiro soon after made the decision to fully commercialize the qem sem technology, and spun off the qem sem research group into a new company called intellection in 2003, based out of brisbane as part of the commercialization process the product name was changed from qem sem to qemscan around this time new solid state x ray detectors were being researched and commerlised, but it was not till the early 2000's these detectors matched similar performances and resolution as ln2 cooled sili detectors these new detector represented a huge leap in the capability for both the qemscan and mla as the biggest limitation of either technique had been the need to collect large number of x ray points, compared to traditional manual acquisition, and the current ln2 cooled sili became the limiting factor due to slower acquisition time and also the need for continual filling of the ln2 dewar the availability of air cooled detectors allowed for longer unattended measurement runs, making both tools more commercial and less academic in 2004 csiro welcomed back the qemscan technology by being the first to buy a system from intellection featuring 4 of these new ssd detectors from rontec, which was later acquired by bruker axs during the 2000's development and capabilities of the qemscan and mla accelerated with the first conference dedicated to these techniques run by minerals enginering international in july 2006, at which point the unofficial term being use for this technique, automated mineralogy, became popularized during the golden years of automated mineralogy the technique saw applications from not just sulphide and precious metal deposits, but also iron ore(maddren et al , 2007), bauxite (kwitko ribeiro et al, 2006), mineral sands (philander et al , 2009), coals(ref), laterites(andersen el al , 2009) and diamonds(benvie, 2007) it was also during this time there was some exploration of using the technique outside the traditional minerals and mining industry, with a hand full of papers looking meteorites(ly et al, 2008) and fly ash as cement additives(chen tan et al , 2009) for the next 3 4 years, growth in the application of automated mienralogy grew as more systems, both qemscan and mla, were sold and deployed globally then in 2009 a seminal event occurred which altered automated mineralogy, with the bankruptcy of intellection, and the acquisition of the ip and assets by fei later in the same year, fei also entered into an agreement to acquire the mla technology from jkmrc this place fei in the front seat of automated mineralogy, having now acquired the only two commercially available automated mineralogy technologies over the short term automated mineralogy continued to grow, with continued development of the qemscan and mla software suite by fei with the first automated mineralogy system sold and deployed in the oil and gas industry in 2010, by fugro robertson (later acquired by cgg) in in the same year the first remote automated mineralogy unit, based on the carl zeiss particlescan, was deployed to the jungles of sumatra, by als ammtec (add picture) this prototype was developed into a commercial tool by cgg, and saw deployment to well sites in nala, apac and the me a similar remote tool was also developed by fei, called qemscan well/mine site, but was never fully commercialized, before fei terminated further development of qemscan/mla in 2015, following acquisition by thermoficher following this 2015 decision to halt future development, automated mineralogy saw limited application growth, with many of the deployed units becoming data generation workhorses and fewer and fewer papers being published on the technique however, in the background this decision opened the door for other manufactures to start development of the next generation tools it was during this downturn in the history of automated mineralogy competitive system were developed, such as amics (advanced mineral identification and characterization system) by dr ying gu following health issues, ying gu made the decision to sell his amics technology to bruker to further develop and commercialize and sadly only a short time later ying gu past away, but his ideas and philosophy on automated minerlaogy developed over 20 years of his commitment to the technique lives with amics and with the partnership with hitachi hitech canada, amics will see further growth as a dedicated tool for future automated mineralogist references reid, a f, and zuiderwyk, m a, 1975 qem sem an interface system for minicomputer control of instruments and devices csiro division of mineral chemistry investigation report 115, august 1975 gu, y and napier munn, t , 1997, jk/philips mineral liberation analyzer–an introduction, mineral processing '97 conference, cape town, as, 1997 maddres j , ly c v , suthers, s p , butcher a r , trudu a g and botha p w\ s k , 2007, a new approach to ore characterisation using automated quantitative mineral analysis, iron ore conference 2007, perth, 2007 kwitko ribeiro, r , ferreira, e e , avelar, a n , gomes, a m d and mano, e s , 2006 automated mineralogy applied to bauxite characterization a case study icsoba , pp 86 93 philander, c , rozendal, 2009, mineral intricacies of the namakwa sands mineral resource, the 7th international heavy minerals conference ‘what next’, the southern african institute of mining and metallurgy, 2009 andersen, j c ø , rollinson, g k , snook, b , herrington, r and fairhurst, r j , 2009, use of qemscan® for the characterization of ni rich and ni poor goethite in laterite ores, minerals engineering, v22n13, pp1119 1129 benvie, b , 2007, mineralogical imaging of kimberlites using sem based techniques, minerals engineering, v20n5, pp435 443 ly, c v , biondo, a and nelson, d r , 2008, qemscan chemical imaging of textures and structures within carbonaceous chondrites and iron meteorites, australian earth science convention 2008, perth, australia, 2008 chen tan, n w , riessen a v and ly c v , 2009, determining the reactivity of a fly ash for production of geopolymer, journal of the american ceramic society, v92n4n pp881 887