Applicability of near-infrared spectroscopy for sensor based sorting of mill pebbles from the Los Bronces copper mine, Chile

Los Bronces is an open pit mine located on a large porphyry copper-molybdenum deposit near Santiago, Chile. Annual production is around 240 000 tonnes of copper and 2 700 tonnes of molybdenum. The extracted ore has a relatively low average copper grade of around 0.6%. This results in relatively high processing costs and creates the need to...