In May 2021, Ken Plozza, Head of Global Digitization – Mining, delivered a Tech Talk at the Austmine Conference in Perth on BASF’s digital journey. The following article is an adapted version of this session.
While it’s been some time since many of us have whipped out a BASF cassette tape to listen to our favourite tune, the story of BASF’s humble cassette tape remains a relevant example of BASF’s dedication to innovation, our ability to find the right partners, and to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to technology.
For those who don’t remember the analogue days, before mp3s, CDs and DVDs, the tape cassette was king for recording sound and video. BASF was one of the original players in the cassette business, dating back to 1932, when it partnered with Germany’s AEG to research and develop cassettes and cassette players based on the first magnetic sound-recording device. In fact, it was a BASF tape that recorded the first concert in 1936, when the London Philharmonic Orchestra played in BASF’s hometown of Ludwigshafen.
Over the years, BASF introduced the first hard-coated tapes in 1950, the first long-play tapes in 1953 and the first chrome tapes in 1971. Our innovation and ability to identify the right partner paid off when the emerging music industry chose BASF technology to record master tapes. Later with the advent of the personal cassette, once again BASF was well placed to be the ‘go to’ brand for your music collection. When the video market then exploded, the BASF magnetic tape was the industry leader.
As the music and video industry developed it was clear that magnetic tape technology had a finite life, so BASF invested and partnered to produce ultraviolet sensitive dyes suitable for the emerging CD and DVD markets. As this market matured, BASF then redirected their research and development to find novel chemical solutions in the manufacturing of hard memory devices like your USB.
As a result of this continuous innovation, BASF became a household name practically the world over, and the reason a chemical company is remembered for these humble tapes!
Let’s fast forward to 2018 when the BASF Mining Team recognised the need for our business to embrace the full potential of industry 4.0. As a result, BASF sought the right partner and found it in IntelliSense.io. Together we developed cutting edge technology combining BASF chemical and mining process knowledge with IntelliSense’s industry leading advanced data analytic solutions.
IntelliSense.io had started life in the Internet of Things space working in the manufacturing industry. With time they realised the value of our technology is in handling process variability and uncertainty in operations. In the mining industry, we found an industry that has an inherent geological risk, and the suitability of our applications was obvious.
The result is the ‘BASF Intelligent Mine powered by IntelliSense. io.’ We have two parts to our technology: a real-time, decisionmaking platform (brains.app), and a portfolio of optimisation applications that focuses on the processes that cover the entire mining value chain, right from the mine to the plant and market.
brains.app is a real-time decision-making platform for asset intensive industries like mining. It is powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT). It collects, cleans, interpolates and assimilates data to produce a federated data lake ready for AI.
Our Optimization as a Service (OaaS) applications are ‘ready to go’ solutions. Each application optimises a specific process within the mine to market value chain. Financial and operational value drivers are configured on-site dynamically. The applications co-operate to predict, simulate and optimise the process; providing high value real-time recommendations through existing controls infrastructure.
Our approach in this field is different to others. We don’t look for correlations in the data and make models from scratch for every client. Instead, over six years has been invested in building physics-based and machine learning assets and models for mining-specific processes for different commodities, spanning base and precious metals, coal, iron ore, mineral sands and rare earths. The software applications come with in-built process data inputs, outputs, and cause and effect relationships. The applications have been developed by a combined team of chemical and mineral processing experts, mining industry professionals, software engineers and data scientists.
This pre-built, model driven product architecture ensures the site implementation phase focuses on calibrating the models to your data parameters and trains the model with your specific data. This allows us to deliver outputs within the first four weeks of any implementation, and the journey is then about training the models to your data, rather than developing models from square one. We operate on a model of continual quarterly updates and major releases, together with easy-to-use academy training and ongoing support to assist implementation and longterm effective use of the software to deliver value.
Today, we’re working with mining majors across key mining markets from Chile, South Africa, Kazakhstan and now Australia, delivering value for their operations. Our Optimization Applications cover the stockpile, crushing, grinding and milling, flotation, thickening, heap leach and pipeline pumping.
Our platform, brains.app, connects these applications together and also offers significant insight across the rest of the plant. We have reconciliation tools, dashboards to visualise your data and financial models to capture the value add or lost opportunities. It offers unique opportunities to create user defined virtual data sets to represent relationships between data within the data lake.
Historically Australia has been a leader in new technology in the mining industry, however when it comes to the mineral processing part of operations, the Australian mining industry is currently in danger of lagging behind other parts of the world. With the BASF Intelligent Mine, we’re proud to offer untapped value of ‘ready to go’ digital solutions that are ready to be deployed now, built by mining professionals for mining professionals.
For more information please contact Ken Plozza at intelligent.mine@basf.com