Can the drill core scanning technology be improved?

Do you dream about combining infrared hyperspectral imaging and XRF into one instrument to get more useful information about your cores? The fusion of these two technologies might not be the solution to improve your data. You will still have incomplete mineralogical information since infrared hyperspectral imaging cannot supply you with information about several useful minerals (e.g. sulfides) as well as native metals. The combination with XRF will add some information about the core’s multi-elemental content, but nevertheless, the sensitive detection of many elements requires a long dwell time, thus limiting the acquisition to every 10 cm. And more importantly, you do not have access to multi-elemental microanalysis on the core’s surface (therefore losing spatial information since XRF core loggers are not hyperspectral imagers) to complement the selectivity of infrared hyperspectral imaging. Furthermore, XRF with a practical scanning dwell time is not sensitive to light elements (i.e. atomic numbers lower than 13).

ELEMISSION’s ECORE drill core scanner brings you the solution to your lack of information with a sensitivity that competes with LA-ICP-MS or SIMS. In fact, the laser-based technology allows a full microanalysis of the drill core, bringing you a complete set of information from the quantitative automated mineralogy to multi-elemental assays (keeping spatial information like texture and deportation), physical properties such as density, hardness, rock quality designation and more. This disruptive technology has been validated for microanalysis using micro-XRF and SEM-EDS (TIMA-X, MLA, QEMSCAN) for ultra-fast and accurate identification of rock’s mineral content. ELEMISSION realized the first 7.6-megapixel hyperspectral image made automatically (without human intervention, except pressing the start button) directly from a surface scanning raster on the drill core. As soon as the scanning data becomes available, ELEMISSION’s software automatically starts interpreting data, generating reports as well as compiling files containing info on quantitative automated mineralogy, multi-elemental assays, rock quality designation, density, hardness of the rocks, and more. These data files are specially designed to be fed to your favorite data mining software for the global interpretation of the orebody.

If you want to learn why ECORE technology is disrupting well-established drill core scanning and core logging technology, please take time to read our new peer-review paper here.