HeapSMART

HeapSMART is our commercially demonstrated simulation system providing heap leach engineers, operators, managers and executives a quantified basis for design-stage and operational decision-making. HeapSMART is applicable at DFS/FEED and detailed design stages and throughout the entire operation lifecycle.

Whether ore under irrigation is oxide, sulphide, transitional or mixed, and whether ore cells and parcels are operating under reagent limited, diffusion limited or reaction limited kinetics, HeapSMART will predict leaching, production and water balance performance based on ore characteristics, historical behaviour, and fundamental principles.

HeapSMART installations are fully supported through calibration checks, software upgrades and user support. HeapSMART is suitable for operation by process engineers and metallurgists, or simulation can be managed by us.

Metal production is about more than just leach rate. Since metal is produced from the circulating inventory of leach solution, changes to solution grades and volumes both in the heaps and throughout process ponds can mean that actual metal production fluctuates month by month.

HeapSMART tracks every ore parcel over its life on the heap, even through re-mining events. Species are leached into solution, and solution flows are tracked through heaps, ponds and processing stages to enable prediction of tonnes produced.

HeapSMART tracks and quantifies leached species throughout the flowsheet to assist in planning for these events.

Forecasting is often about probabilities because some inputs, such as the weather, are not certain ahead of time. Multiple instances of HeapSMART can run concurrently on a single laptop computer, allowing a range of scenarios with known probabilities to be simulated quickly. This, in turn, generates a spread of outputs against those probabilities, allowing appropriate action to be taken.