De Beers Group Ignite™ is now a unified global innovation arm for the De Beers Group, tasked with spearheading corporate and technology innovation initiatives. MechChem Africa talks to Sarandos Gouvelis, head of Incubation, along with Gordon Taylor, head of Commercial Technologies, about this holistic approach to innovation and some of their ongoing successes.
De Beers Group Ignite™, which integrates the De Beers South African and United Kingdom technology and innovation teams, is now one of the Group’s core innovation arms, engaging in the full spectrum of innovation activities from ideation and fundamental research, incubation and commercialising of technologies to developing ecosystems, partnerships and corporate ventures.
“Under the De Beers Group Technologies South Africa banner we have long been engaged in the development and commercialisation of technologies for upstream mining operations. You may remember our XRT diamond scanning, sampling and sorting system; or our RhoVol advanced density profiling and sorting system for determining the density of an ore sample by measurement of the mass and volume of the sample on an individual particle basis,” begins Gordon Taylor, who is now the head of Commercial Technologies for De Beers’ IGNITE team.
“De Beers also operated a sister organisation in Maidenhead, UK, which, like us, developed proprietary diamond technology: for sorting and grading diamonds according to size, quality and value, for example; and for the downstream marketing and retail side,” he tells MechChem Africa.
Following a strategic review in 2019, De Beers recognised the synergy between these two technology groups and the advantages of establishing a new and global innovation platform to improve the overall impact of its innovation initiatives, Taylor adds.
Expanding on this, Sarandos Gouvelis, now the head of Ignite Incubation, says a much wider set of synergies was also recognised. “We were operating geographically separate technology units and standalone hubs that were looking at specific problems such as robotics and technologies in the polishing industries. Then there was a corporate team of about five people who were developing De Beers’ corporate innovation approach, how we approached new business models across the value chain as well as new technology ideas and projects that might result in new businesses, ecosystems and ventures,” he continues.
“The outcome of the review was a decision to bring the global De Beers Group closer together from an innovation perspective, merging all the separated units and using technology and our corporate innovation framework to innovate in an integrated way across all aspects of our diamond business,” Sarandos explains.
“This resulted in De Beers Group Ignite, which brings together the disparate hubs, technologies, research, science, innovation, business intelligence, product supply, etc, into a much more coherent overall entity that stretches all the way from ideation to implementation,” he tells MechChem Africa.
“Ignite enables us to leverage our internal resources and look outwards into the world to get better ideas from academia, industry, other start-ups and carry these into new technology and business models. The approach enables us to merge our deep diamond knowledge, our technical expertise, our ability to create relevant cutting edge technology and instrumentation with our globally connected diamond business networks,” he says.
Data and the IIoT
“While there’s a lot of innovation in the equipment we develop, innovation also involves data and how we can use it to establish connections to look at better efficiencies, better effectiveness and better performance from the systems we use across the value chain,” Gouvelis continues.
This involves looking at the broader resource management level, trying to manage and monitor production levels with much faster cycle times and to deal with operational problems more quickly.
“Superficially, this is about looking at process and machine performance, but at its core, it has to be about people. Any digital strategy has to start all the way at the bottom. It has to change people’s lives and the way our operators engage in the diamond business, from the mine to the jeweller,” argues Sarandos Gouvelis.
“While we do lots of condition monitoring, the innovations go beyond this. We are extracting data from the ore that we’re processing, for example, and by analysing this additional data, we can make better predictive decisions about downstream processes,” continues Taylor.
“With our x-ray transmission (XRT) diamond sorting technology, for example, there’s a lot of extra information that we know is useful upstream. We have worked quite hard to make sure we can extract more of this information, to enable the size and shape of the diamonds and ore to be simultaneously measured during the sorting process, for example, which could ultimately lead to a greater degree of understanding and control of upstream mining and comminution processes.
Natural diamonds, Taylor explains, tend to have a set of unique characteristics that can be categorised using various optical technologies, on a batch or individual basis. “From phosphorescence and unique laser-induced luminescence spectra data, we have created a diamond database system capable of uniquely identifying our diamonds,” he says.
Gouvelis adds that the technology is already being used to identify synthetically manufactured or artificially modified diamonds in a mix of natural diamond stock. “It is very important for the security of our value chain, the protection of our markets and consumer confidence to be able to prove that the diamonds we sell are 100% pure, natural and untreated,” he says.
“Customers are also becoming more interested in the origin of a diamond, not only where it comes from but the history of its journey through the supply chain. We are moving to being able to provide this story through the use of our technology and our digital backbone,” he informs MechChem Africa.
Onboard the Benguela Gem
One of the latest deployments of De Beer’s XRT technology is for De Beers Marine Namibia onboard its custom-built diamond recovery vessel, The Benguela Gem. “The original core function of our XRT machines is to sample the size and frequency distribution of diamonds in the ore being mined,” Taylor explains. “On the Benguela Gem, a gravel slurry is pumped off the seabed and transported onto the ship. Following dewatering, screening, density separation and x-ray recovery processes, the resultant diamond bearing gravel stream is passed through the XRT scanner, which immediately audits the size frequency distribution of the diamonds in the sample. Using this information the operational team can make real-time decisions concerning the mining or processing efficiency.
“This maximises the recovery potential of the process, adding significant amounts of value to De Beers Marine Namibia’s operational efficiency,” he adds.
The Benguela Gem will mine and ‘can’ diamond-enriched gravel for transportation to on-land sorting stations. “Ultimately, however, the XRT scanners will be set up as re-concentrators so that final diamond sorting can take start to take place as part of the process flow of the onboard mining operation,” Taylor informs MechChem Africa.
Another technology with potential on the analytics side of Ignite’s offering is RhoVol, De Beer’s automatic densiometric analysis system that uses proprietary image processing to determine the volume of individual particles in a sample before measuring the mass of the same particle. “These two measurements enable us to calculate the density of the particles and build up a complete profile of the sample. The system can also use this information to sort a sample according to exact particle densities,” Taylor explains.
“Our commercial machines can accurately process particles of 3.0 mm and above and Kumba Iron Ore has been using this system for several years to optimise the performance of the dense medium separation units.
“The next trajectory of this particular technology is to reduce the size range so we can process and analyse gravels in the size range of 1.0 to 3.0 mm. We have now developed a prototype system that goes from 1.0 to 8.0 mm, which covers the majority of the gravel size distribution passing through dense media separation processes. This enables the ideal ore separation density set-point to be adjusted in pseudo real time, helping to continuously predict and adjust plant settings for optimum recovery,” he notes.
“From an innovation perspective, we are very conscious of environmental perspectives and the need to support De Beers ‘Building Forever’ initiatives. Ignite’s new core vision is to purposely ask if we are doing good in the world. We want to leave the world in a better state than we found it, so all our operations and processes need to be contributing to reduced energy and water usage, smaller physical footprints and movement towards the circular economy.
“Ignite brings all of our forward looking initiatives together to deliver on the unified De Beers vision and purpose – and we love what we do, because it’s seriously cool,” Gouvelis concludes.
