Seeks to contribute to the safe and reliable operation of tailings deposits, developing tools to improve the monitoring of physical stability and potential impact on surrounding waters, providing quality and timely information to authorities, mining companies and communities, contributing to the development of trust and improving communication between parties as well as the response to emergency situations.

The Open Innovation in Mining Program, Expande, is a public-private initiative designed and executed by Fundación Chile. The purpose is to promote innovation and make possible a better future for global mining, strengthening the mining ecosystem in Chile and to constitute a collaborative model that enables the best solutions for the highly complex challenges of mining today and tomorrow.

In this context, there is a need to survey the local and international ecosystem to identify development capabilities to meet the challenge of “Monitoring and Alert Software for Tailings Deposits”.

General Aspects:

The economic and social development of Chile is directly related to the exploitation of copper deposits, highlighting that in the medium to long term, more than 80 % of this production will come from the process of mineral concentration, a situation that with the decline in grades will mean an annual increase in treated ore of around 2 % as a result of this lower grade and the need to maintain current production levels.

A relevant aspect of the mentioned process is that over 98 % of the ore treated in the concentrator plants contains copper grades lower than 0.1 % , so it is discarded in the form of pulp (tailings) and deposited in places specially prepared for its storage.

The registry of tailings deposits in Chile (updated August/2020 ) shows more than 750 deposits in different states of installation (under construction, active, inactive and abandoned).

Due to the dynamic nature of tailings deposits, as well as their impact on the environment and human safety, a system oriented to online monitoring of deposits is required, which facilitates communication between all parties involved .

Objective:

Identify supplier companies with experience and capacity to develop software that allows the management of data to obtain, online and discrete (manual and massive load) of different operational and design parameters that allow: to identify and predict in a reliable and timely manner performance conditions of tailings deposits in the areas of physical stability and its impact on surrounding waters, and from this automatic analysis inform online early warnings to the parties involved.

Minimum functionalities:

• Online data capture and processing.
• Advanced analytical tools to identify trends, process historical information and develop technical indicators of physical stability and impact on surrounding waters.
• User-configurable reporting tools.
• Visualization tools.

Compatibility:

• Compatible with the systems of different entities (Sernageomin, Fundación Chile, Mining companies) including interface management (API) and Web Services.
• Programming languages/frameworks (Javascript, Node, React, Django, R, Python).
• Standardized database storage (Postgres / PostGIS / Elasticsearch).
• Ability to add new features.

Continuous availability (24/7 desirable) including:

• Help Desk (accessible through web, phone and/or e-mail).
• Maintenance service: corrective, predictive and preventive.
• Specialized support service with expert personnel available. Troubleshooting, Request Resolution (Information, Connection, General Operation)).

Development Intellectual Property:

• The development Intellectual Property is owned by Fundación Chile.

IT infrastructure characteristics:

• IT infrastructure deployed in Microsoft Azure.
• Devops based on Terraform, Ansible – CI/CD