Aplik has developed a copper cathode inspection system (including the design, construction and project start-up) for
the Spence mining company
, owned by BHPBilliton.
At this mining site there are two CSQA, one for each of the Stripping Machines installed in the electro-winning complex.
With this CSQA we can identify and assess specific characteristics of the copper cathodes using a high resolution vision system.
While proCCat, also developed by Aplik, physically separates all the cathodes into accepted and rejected classes, the handling at Spence is made by the Stripping Machine itself, and the quality report generated for each cathode is directly saved in Spence's corporate database.
This perfect-matching between CSQA and the Stripping Machine was the natural outcome of the close relation between, BHPBilliton, Xstrata, Mesco and Aplik during each step of the development: conceptual, basic and detail engineering.
Cathodes are handled by the Stripping Machine through different steps: washing, visual inspection, bending, stripping, physical split, hoop, etc. During the cycling of the cathodes, Aplik's CSQA performs a vertical scan for each cathode.
This combined system operating as a single machine (Gantry crane, Stripping Machine and the Cathode Surface Quality Analyzer (CSQA)) results in the most advanced and automated electro-winning processing technology in the world.
One one the essential characteristics of this technology is the image processing system. At Spence the CSQA is used to ensure the quality of the final product as well as to correct the production process. This can be achieved because each of the steel blanks that are used to generate the cathodes has a unique RFID TAG. The CSQA system ties the quality of each copper cathode to the blank that generated it.
Spence's corporate database keeps a register of each cathode's quality analysis, the time and date of its generation, the cell of origin and other process data. Given that the internal process variables have been quantified by the use of the CSQA technology, this new information can used in mathematical models of the production process in order to place it in a control loop.