I-ROX

Company Description

In a world where electrification of everything is a megatrend, the implication will be a large increase in the demand for metals that support that strategy, such as copper, cobalt and nickel. In metals and minerals mining operations, there are two purposes for the comminution process: liberation of the ore from gangue minerals and reduction in size to suitable particle size for downstream separation processes. Comminution is an inherently inefficient process as the ratio of mechanical strain energy input to the fracture surface area generated is very small. Grinding, the final stage of comminution, is not only the most energy intensive and expensive part of metal extraction, but it is also the operation where the potential for improvement is the greatest in terms of the theoretical minimum. However, historical technological improvements have been incremental in nature and energy consumption remains very far from this theoretical minimum. I-ROX is a disruptive technology that applies ultrashort electrical pulses to efficiently fragment rocks using very small amounts of electrical energy, thereby reducing the size from centimeters to microns.