Hello Everyone,

We would like to thank those participants who attended our recent webinar. Your questions were insightful and illuminated a few areas where there may be confusion among solvers.

We would like to issue a clarification as well as extend the submission deadline by 3 weeks, to March 23 at 12 noon Eastern Time. The following points have been added as clarification to the Challenge Guidelines:

  • Your solution must use as an input crushed ore of less than 3 inches in diameter containing ~32 % TiO2 .
    • We intend to produce additional volume of this ore that would feed the process you are proposing. Currently, this ore feeds our smelter and it will continue to in the future.  See the diagram below.
  • Your process cost should be below 50$/t (mining costs, crushing costs to minus 3 inches and shipping costs from the mine to the client are not part of the process costs).
    • Please see the Cost Estimating Worksheet in the Resources tab to calculate your proposed cost.
  • Your proposal should be a standalone process implemented directly at the mine site. If the process isn’t implemented at the mine site, additional shipping cost should be included in the cost estimate.

You may review our current beneficiation process description in the resource section, but your solution should be implemented prior to the current beneficiation process as described in the diagram below. You should not use the beneficiated ore of our metallurgical complex as the input to your solution.

Thank you to everyone who participated in the Feb. 6 Webinar for the Rio Tinto Ore Upgrading Challenge. We hope that the webinar and this recording are helpful to you in your submission creation. Based on the questions received, we have worked to clarify the scope and focus for the challenge with updated information. The main Q & A from the webinar has been added into the FAQ and the webinar is below.

If you have any questions, you may comment in the challenge forum and we'll do our best to answer for you.