Computational Engineering From the Pit Wall to the Furnace
One Continuous Physical Problem, From Ore Body to Product
A mining and metals business runs a single chain of physics. Rock deforms as pore pressure changes. Ore is broken, separated and thickened by mechanics that decide recovery. Kilns, furnaces and gas cleaning systems turn concentrate into product under heat and flow that are hard to instrument and harder to guess at. Slurry moves the material between them and quietly wears the pipe that carries it. We model those stages from first principles, on open engineering codes that the operator owns outright, so the same model can be interrogated by the people who have to live with the decision.
What We Help Solve
The failures in this sector are slow to appear, expensive to reverse, and usually visible in the physics long before they are visible in the data.
Slope and Tailings Behaviour Assessed Without Coupled Physics
Pit walls and tailings facilities are commonly assessed with deformation and groundwater treated as separate problems. The mechanism that matters couples them, and a model that separates them will look stable until it does not
Recovery Losses Nobody Can Locate
Comminution and separation circuits are tuned by experience because there is no model of the mechanics that explains where the value is being lost. Improvement stays trial and error, one campaign at a time
Thermal Plant Run on Operator Memory
Kilns, furnaces and gas cleaning systems are rarely simulated, so combustion, heat distribution and refractory life are managed by feel. Energy per tonne stays higher than it needs to be and the plant learns nothing between campaigns
Slurry Systems That Wear in Places Nobody Predicted
Erosion, settling and blockage in slurry pipelines and material handling are treated as maintenance events rather than as flow problems with a computable cause. Failures repeat at the same bends
CAPABILITIES FOR MINING & METALS
Geomechanics, process and thermal simulation, and interrogable AI applied across the chain from the ore body to the finished product.
Fully coupled modelling of rock deformation and pore pressure, which is where the sector's largest risks actually live.
Pit slope stability with coupled seepage and deformation, including drawdown and rainfall response
Tailings storage facility behaviour, consolidation, liquefaction susceptibility and dam raise sequencing
Underground stability, backfill performance and subsidence prediction over the life of the mine
In-situ and heap leach flow modelling for solution distribution and recovery
Dewatering and groundwater interaction assessment for permitting and closure planning
Flow, heat and particle mechanics for the plant, built on open engineering codes with results cross-checked against an independent method.
Furnace, kiln and calciner combustion and heat distribution, including refractory thermal loading
Gas cleaning, ducting and fugitive dust dispersion around the plant and the wider site
Comminution, transfer chutes, stockpiles and material handling through discrete element modelling
Flotation, thickening and classification hydrodynamics for recovery and throughput
Slurry pipeline hydraulics, settling behaviour and erosion wear prediction at bends and fittings
Water and energy balance across the circuit, so an efficiency case can be argued from physics
Predictive intelligence built so that an engineer can ask why and receive an answer grounded in the behaviour of the machine.
Failure prediction for mills, crushers, conveyors, pumps and rotating equipment with attributed cause
Calibrated uncertainty on every forecast, so a horizon can be planned against rather than reacted to
Process optimisation that reports the mechanism it is exploiting and remains valid as feed changes
Computer vision on conveyors, froth surfaces, haul roads and plant areas for measurement and for safety
Decision records that stand up in an incident investigation or a regulatory review
Resolving the same physical equipment across the systems that describe it differently, with the source of every value retained.
Reconciliation of historian, laboratory, maintenance and business system references into one asset model
Provenance on every value, traceable back to the system and the record it came from
Integration with existing control and information systems rather than replacement of them
A foundation that makes later simulation and AI work possible instead of repeatedly blocked
The engineering codes we build on are open, which changes the economics and removes a class of strategic risk.
Simulation capability built on OpenFOAM, SU2, FEniCSx, deal.II, PETSc and preCICE
No per-core licence fee, so a study can be scaled to the size the question deserves
Deployable on premise, in country, or fully air-gapped, with source code retained by the operator
Workflows delivered as versioned, reproducible code, so a result can be regenerated and audited years later
Capability transfer to the operator's own engineers as a stated deliverable of the engagement
Bring Us One Problem That Is Costing You This Quarter
A wall that is moving, a circuit losing recovery, a furnace nobody has modelled, or a pipeline that keeps wearing at the same bend. We will tell you what can be computed and what cannot.