Project description
Digging up sustainable innovation in Europe’s mining industry
The European mining industry perceives that introducing new and radical production systems will have high investment costs that will reduce their competitiveness. Via various high-level mining pilots, the EU-funded NEXGEN-SIMS project will explore the scale-up of promising digital technologies to conclusively demonstrate that they support sustainability in the mining industry. Furthermore, the project will create incitements and reduce the risk for investments for upgrading, retrofitting, and replacing carbon-neutral technologies. It will aim for the introduction of new innovative solutions based on industrial Internet of Things. The new technologies will increase productivity, contribute to securing the existing raw materials production and future supply by unlocking access to unexploited resources.
Objective
NEXGEN-SIMS will be focusing on scale-up of promising technologies and demonstrating their potential at several large scale mining pilots, which will provide the mining industry the necessary means of addressing the future challenges in sustainable mining while at the same time NEXGEN-SIMS will be creating incitements and lowering the risk for investments associated with upgrading, retrofitting and replacing existing investments with carbon neutral technologies as well as introduction of new innovative solutions based on industrial IoT. Many fears that introduction of new and radical production systems (in our case, digitalization in combination with carbon-neutral mining systems) are associated with high investment costs that will make the European mining industry less competitive even though the facts clearly indicates the complete opposite. With NEXGEN-SIMS we intend to
demonstrate that utilization of innovative solutions based on new implementations of cost-efficient connectivity can enable better monitoring, analytics, optimization and process control (primarily for the mining fleets), and that connectivity can enable introduction of new and improved optimization and automatization strategies of the unit operations associated with the material handling processes by means of carbon-neutral mining systems. The estimated potential with NEXGEN-SIMS in terms of increased productivity is large and has been estimated to be as high as 40%, which will contribute considerably to securing the existing raw materials production in Europe as well as securing the future supply and lead to unlocking of substantial reserves of new or of today unexploited resources.
Fields of science
Not validated
Not validated
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
702 25 OREBRO
Sweden