Crushers, SAG and ball mills, flotation cells, thickeners
Equipment shipped Orebex-ready, with the controller tags, limits and envelope declared at the factory. The agent runs on the OEM machine; the OEM keeps the machine relationship.
Partners
The channel is the equipment.
Orebex's distribution plan runs through the companies already in the concentrator: mill and flotation OEMs, froth-vision and analyzer vendors, process-control and MES vendors, and the engineering firms and integrators who connect them. The programme opens with the design-partner cohort; nothing here is a signed partnership.
Illustrative scenario: Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend, one shift, one approval gate
Partner types
Who fits, and how
How each kind of partner fits the plan.
Froth cameras, online XRF, particle-size analyzers
Camera and analyzer streams fused into Frothix. The vendor keeps the measurement; Orebex adds the prediction, the early warning and the closed loop.
Mill and flotation APC, expert systems, DCS
Guarded writes through the control layer the plant already runs. The vendor keeps the loop; Orebex adds the policy engine, the twin check and the record.
Shift plans, blends, genealogy, geometallurgy models
Genealogy written back into the system of record, and geometallurgy models exchanged with the twin. Evidence packets for customer and environmental review.
OT, plant networks, commissioning
Connection, tag inventory and the shadow-mode weeks of a pilot, delivered by people the plant already trusts.
Design partners
The first two to four concentrators shape the roadmap and get written access terms. See the customers page.
How it works
What a partner does and gets
The outline of the programme as planned.
A partner does
- Declares the tags, limits, envelopes and interfaces on the systems they ship or support
- Co-delivers the shadow-mode and assist-mode weeks of a pilot
- Brings a concentrator with a metric and a signed baseline
A partner gets
- An Orebex-ready designation for the machine, analyzer or MES, once the connector is proven
- A share of the Circuit and Concentrator subscription on plants they bring
- Early access to the SDK and the twin for their own engineering
Integrations
It speaks concentrator, not cloud
Orebex reads and writes through the systems already in the plant. No rip and replace, no parallel historian, no new HMI to learn. Vendor names are examples of systems found in concentrators, not certified integrations; connector availability is confirmed per site.
Mill control and APC (Metso, FLSmidth, ABB, Weir class systems)
Load, power, feed and water reads, guarded writes
Flotation APC and expert optimisers (ABB Expert Optimizer, Metso ACT, Honeywell, Andritz class systems)
Air, level and reagent reads; supervised reagent writes
Froth cameras and froth-vision systems (Metso VisioFroth, Stone Three, JKTech class tools)
Camera streams fused by Frothix
Online XRF and particle-size analyzers (Malvern Panalytical, Thermo Fisher and CIDRA, Metso, FLSmidth PSI class systems)
Grade and P80 reads per stream
Collector, frother, depressant and flocculant dosing systems
Dose reads; supervised and bounded writes
Cyclone clusters, separators, thickeners, filters
Pressure, density, bed and cycle reads, guarded writes
Plant DCS tags and time-series historians
Backfill, replay, time alignment
LIMS and assay results
Delayed labels for every prediction
Run timeline · scenario
One scenario run, step by step
Every Orebex run is an ordered, inspectable sequence. This is run_4b9e27 on Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend. Scenario completes in 10 steps with one approval gate. P80 held at 148 µm as the blend hardened, froth stability recovered on rougher bank 2 after an air trim, a collector-dose change was approved by the shift metallurgist, predicted recovery held inside the plan, lot C-20931 released with full genealogy.
run_4b9e27
Line 1 · SAG and ball circuit, rougher bank 2 · copper porphyry blend
illustrative scenario
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.shift
SUCCEEDED
0.7 s
Concentrator Orchestrator · Pulled the shift plan from the concentrator MES: copper porphyry blend B-14, P80 target 150 µm, concentrate grade at or above 25% Cu, recovery target per the geometallurgy model, energy and water budgets. Locked the operating envelope for the blend.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
58 s
Concentrator Twin · Simulated 32 candidate grind, air and reagent schemes on the as-run twin for the hardening blend, ranked on predicted recovery, concentrate grade, kWh per tonne and water per tonne. Two candidates breached the thickener bed limit and were discarded.
-
03
grind.setpoint
SUCCEEDED
3 m 40 s
Crush-and-Grind · SAG-1 feed trimmed 3% and cyclone water raised as load and power signatures read a harder feed. P80 from the particle-size analyzer held at 148 µm against the 150 µm target; mill power stayed inside the energy budget.
-
04
froth.read
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Grade-and-Froth · Twelve froth cameras and the online XRF on rougher bank 2 fused at the edge. Froth stability on cells 3 and 4 fell as the blend hardened; predicted recovery drifted 0.4 points below plan. Early warning published to the control agents.
-
05
approve.human
APPROVAL
1 m 12 s
Concentrator Orchestrator · Scheme #7 raises collector dose 6% on rougher bank 2, above the standing reagent scheme. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised on this blend, so the step was held for the shift metallurgist and approved at 07:19:44.
-
06
float.dose
SUCCEEDED
2 m 05 s
Float-and-Reagent · Approved collector dose applied with an air trim of 4% down on cells 3 and 4 inside the envelope. Froth stability recovered within eight minutes; predicted recovery returned to plan with concentrate grade read at 25.6% Cu.
-
07
classify.cyclone
SUCCEEDED
42 s
Separate-and-Classify · One cyclone brought online in cluster 1 as feed density rose with the hardness change, holding overflow size and circulating load inside the plan.
-
08
dewater.thickener
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Thicken-and-Dewater · Tailings thickener TH-2 flocculant dose trimmed as bed pressure rose; underflow density held and overflow clarity stayed inside the water-recovery target.
-
09
optimise.targets
SUCCEEDED
18 s
Throughput-and-Recovery · Whole-plant targets recomputed for the hardened blend: feed rate, P80, air and reagent targets handed to the control agents with recovery, grade, energy and water inside the budget. The losing candidates and their scores are in the run record.
-
10
lot.release
SUCCEEDED
1 m 30 s
Quality-and-Conformance · Concentrate lot C-20931 released: genealogy written (blend, grind record, reagent and air moves, froth and grade reads, approvals, dewatering record, assays as they land) and dispositioned against the concentrate spec with cited evidence for the metallurgist's sign-off.
Accelerated computing
Physical AI, at the bank and the mill
Froth changes in seconds and a shift of feed is gone before the assay lands. Perception has to be local, deterministic and fast, so Orebex runs GPU inference at the plant edge and keeps training, simulation and optimisation in the cloud or on-prem.
Edge perception
8 to 24 froth cameras per bank at 15 to 30 FPS plus online XRF, particle-size, pump, level, air, reagent, density and energy streams fused at the plant edge. Sub-250 ms froth inference and local fail-safe through a network outage are the design targets. Jetson Thor is planned.
Model serving
Froth, particle and mineralogy, recovery prediction, time-series anomaly and metallurgy retrieval models behind one orchestrator at the plant edge, 20 to 60 per site as a design target, with versioned canaries and rollback.
Training
Froth segmentation, bubble velocity and stability, grade and recovery prediction, ore hardness, grind-size response, reagent response and metallurgy assistants trained on froth video, analyzer readings, telemetry and metallurgist corrections. 2,000 to 8,000 GPU-hours per commodity model family is the design target once partner data exists.
Concentrator twin
Grinding, flotation, classification and dewatering simulated as-run against as-designed before the shift. GPU comminution and DEM, flotation and geometallurgy simulation is the workload; physics-informed surrogates with Modulus are planned so schemes rank at production cadence.
Synthetic data
Rare froth-collapse, feed-upset, mineralogy-shift, equipment-drift and camera-fouling cases generated and validated against real assay distributions before promotion. 50k to 250k scenarios per commodity and circuit class is the design target.
Optimisation
Throughput, energy, water and reagent allocation and the grade and recovery trade-off solved before the shift and during upset recovery, and handed to the control agents as targets.
Robot sampling and handling
Sampling routes, reagent tote inspection and inspection rovers trained and validated in simulation before they run on site. Assistive until the safety case is proven.
GPU ETL
Daily features from froth, analyzer, mill, flotation, dewatering and genealogy telemetry for retraining, drift detection and recovery, energy, water and reagent benchmarks.
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions processing managers, metallurgists and sustainability leads ask in the first meeting.
Yes, but only within an explicit tag allow-list with per-tag rate and magnitude limits, inside the operating envelope for the blend, and only at the autonomy level your plant has set. Design partners start in shadow mode, where Orebex writes nothing. Reagent-scheme changes stay supervised by a named metallurgist until the ore type is characterised.
Control returns to the APC or DCS last known-good state. Orebex is a supervisory layer on top of the control systems and interlocks you already run, never a replacement for them, so an outage degrades the circuit to its current way of running, not to a stop. The edge is designed to run fail-safe through a network outage.
Advisory recommendations start from the twin and the shift plan in the first weeks. Froth, grade, recovery and grind-response prediction improve as circuit history and assay-labelled outcomes accumulate per ore type. The compute plan sizes training at 2,000 to 8,000 GPU-hours per commodity model family once partner data exists, a design target.
Only if you choose cloud training. Ore-body data, geometallurgy models, reagent schemes, process models and recovery records are isolated per tenant and never used to train another customer's models. A fully on-prem deployment at the plant edge is available for remote and IP-sensitive sites, and federated learning across sites is planned and waits on data-rights agreements.
You are, the same as with any control strategy, which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything above your risk threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the evidence, the envelope applied and the human decision.
A paid pilot of 90 to 120 days on one grinding or flotation circuit, scoped to a single wedge with a success metric written into the order form: recovery gain, energy per tonne saved, water reduction or reagent per tonne. The first weeks baseline recovery, energy and water in shadow mode from your own assays and meters.
Get started
Talk about partnering
Tell us what you ship or support and which concentrators run it.