Measuring Light Elements for Mineral Process Control

Mines are increasingly interested in monitoring the content ‘penalty minerals’ during process control, where penalty minerals are minerals that do not contain valuable metals but can be disruptive to processing.

The Problem

Penalty minerals typically contain higher elemental contents of light elements such as Na, Mg, Al, Si, S, P and K. Additionally, light elements such as H and O are critical for in-situ resource utilisation (ISRU) in the lunar environment. Both on earth and in the lunar environment, it is difficult to quantitatively measure the elemental content of light elements using in-situ sensors.

Our Solution

This project will build develop two custom sensor prototypes optimised for measuring light elements out in the field. The first sensor will use X-ray Fluorescence (XRF) with improved analysis algorithms and the second sensor will use Laser Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) to measure the light element composition of lunar regolith simulant.

Collaborators

This project is lead by Brianna Ganly (MR) in collaboration with Joel O’Dwyer (MR) and the MEA team (https://www.csiro.au/en/work-with-us/ip-commercialisation/marketplace/mineralogical-and-elemental-analyser), the Space Technologies FSP ISRU team (https://research.csiro.au/space/), postdoc Jack Webster and PhD students Molly Kirkpatrick (UoW) and Marcus Miljak (UNSW).