A Micro DMS plant has been shipped by DRA to Mineral Services in Vancouver, Canada. The “stand alone” micro DMS unit, which is the first to be sold in Canada has been installed in a purpose built facility in North Vancouver. The plant which was commissioned during September 2003 will be used to recover indicator minerals from exploration samples for a growing client base throughout Canada. “DMS has proven to be more efficient and has significant benefits when compared to other recovery methods such as panning, jigging and concentrating tables the operation of which is often operator dependent. In short DMS technology removes the guesswork from any sampling programme”, explains Ian Gilbert, Process Engineer at DRA.

Micro DMS plant commissioned at Mineral Services

The plant is designed around a small diameter gravity fed cyclone and is capable of recovering heavy minerals and diamonds from prepared loam and stream sediment samples or crushed drill core in the –6 + 1mm and –2+0.3mm size ranges.

To prevent contamination and to ensure recovery of mineral grains down to 300 microns the DMS cyclone is machined from stainless steel. The standard Micro DMS plant is capable of treating upto twenty 50kg (-2+0.3mm) samples a day.

DRA also builds a Micro ‘Plus’ DMS plant which incorporates additional equipment such as a rotary scrubber, feed preparation screen, mixing box, de-watering cyclone, crushers and conveyors. This changes the standard Micro DMS plant from an exploration tool into a mini bulk sampling facility, which dependant on the material type is capable of treating up to 5 tph through the front end, the DMS cyclone however is limited to 1.5 tph of scrubbed and screened material.

DRA also designs and builds larger diamond recovery plants. The circuit could include any combination of scrubbing, crushing, DMS, wet and dry x-ray machines, grease tables, secure diamond sorting glove boxes and security monitoring equipment.