ASD Inc., a Colorado, USA-based supplier of analytical instrumentation for materials measurement, recently introduced two mining industry-specific spectroscopic measurement devices—the TerraSpec Examiner and TerraSpec Explorer—for analysis of minerals in production and exploration.
According to the company, the TerraSpec Examiner is well-suited for use in the lab or field to perform quantitative materials analysis of ore in production. It offers 10-nm resolution, a broad spectral range of 350–2,500 nm, and can be used for monitoring moisture, acid-consuming gangue minerals, clays and other materials influencing process outcome. When combined with application-specific calibrations from ASD’s SummitCAL Solutions, mining operations can build on existing sample analysis to analyze a much larger set of samples in a significantly reduced amount of time. This can result in tighter process control and significant cost savings in variety of mining processes, including agglomeration, flotation, ore sorting and heap leach.
The company’s TerraSpec Explorer spectrometer is designed for rapid qualitative minerals analysis during exploration and deposit mapping. The portable instrument provides immediate mineralogical results and can assist in analyzing a wide variety of deposit types by determining the key alteration minerals. With a spectral range of 350–2,500 nm and 6-nm resolution, it has the accuracy needed to help geologists evaluate samples across a broad area, rapidly determine the mineralogy of prospective mining locations, identify alteration patterns and classify ore systems.
