New digs for MIWATCH- introducing the ‘Secondary Prospectivity labs’

Earlier this year, the MIWATCH team made the move to North Wing, one of the oldest parts of the UQ Experimental Mine Site at Indooroopilly, Queensland. MIWATCH are sharing this space with the blasting research team from the UQ School of  Mechanical and Mining Engineering led by Associate Professor Italo Onederra.

fPreviously, this building had housed many research teams, including the School of Mining Engineering (teaching students about underground mining by taking them down!), JKTECH and most recently from the School of Chemical Engineering.  

As part of this renovation, major work took place over the past four months to open up the lab floor space which included the removal of the affectionally termed ‘green rig’ in April 2024, and the ‘blue rig’.

Timelapse of the ‘blue rig’ removal in July 2024 (Timelapse produced by Nathan Fox and Archibald Parbhakar-Fox).

Now with this space opened up, the MIWATCH team are looking forward to undertaking more hands-on work in the newly designated ‘secondary prospectivity laboratory’, with support from the Production Centre Pilot Plant team led by Mitchell Alexander.

This includes a designated area for mine waste sample preparation, geoenvironmental testing (static and kinetic testing), metal extraction from mine waste research as well as setting up benchtop instruments to enable more drill core and mine waste analysis for early determination of geoenvironmental properties assisting with rapid determination of secondary prospectivity opportunities (i.e., using handheld laser induced breakdown spectroscopy, hyperspectral mineralogy tools, mineral hardness rebound testing and measuring a range geophysical parameters).

While we have already welcomed many visiting parties over at North Wing renovations will be continuing over the next few weeks. After this time, we intend to provide a full list of analytical capabilities to help facilitate mine waste characterisation on our website.