The winner of the Copper to the World 2026 Innovation Hour challenge is ready to take its impressive software and sensor platform to markets outside Chile after turning heads in Adelaide.
Co-founder and chief technology officer at Concepcion-based Konatec, Dr Leopoldo Gutierrez, convinced judges the company’s rheology monitoring and optimisation technology was the real deal, with a 2.6% copper recovery gain from one user’s rougher flotation circuit generating US$80 million of extra annual income.
The eight-year-old Konatec has installed what it calls its online rheological ecosystem at major Chile copper operations such as Escondida, Spence, Collahuasi, Chuquicamata, Andina, Ministro Hales and Sierra Gorda.
Gutierrez told Copper to the World, hosted by Austmine and the South Australian government, replacing traditional batch monitoring with Konatec’s continuous real-time technology was a gamechanger.
“The world needs more copper and other metals to support human development and a more sustainable future,” he said.
“But now the mining companies are having some key challenges … such as the need to process more complex ores, pressures to increase productivity and sustainability, so the mining operations are becoming smarter. They are incorporating new technologies to measure important variables in real time but there is a fundamental variable that plays a very important role and it needs to be incorporated to complete this real-time picture.
“That is the rheology [and] the rheological behavior of mineral suspensions.
“Rheology matters because it defines slurry transport. It defines the efficiency of very different unit operations in the mineral processing plant. Most importantly now it defines how much water I use to transport slurries in mineral processing plants.
“Today there is a very important opportunity to measure all these rheological properties in real time and to optimise the process.”
The University of Concepcion spinout developed and commercialised its KRheo multi-parameter rheology sensor and RheoThink software, including an “AI agent” set up to generate operating recommendations.
“We also have this ecosystem in tailings thickening stages and we also help some of these companies to increase water recovery by 5-6% just by controlling the rheological behavior of the slurries in real time,” Gutierrez said.
“Every new implementation we are working on generates more data, more experience, more knowledge and that’s very good for creating this kind of rheological intelligence and moving towards advanced rheological process control.
“We think that Konetec is transforming online rheology into intelligence and intelligence into operational culture and I think that’s the way we have to go as a company in terms of the applications to the copper mining industry and other [sectors] too, because this is a technology that can be applied to all of the mining industry.”
The Chilean company was up against another Chile firm, ME Elecmetal, and Australian-based NGMX, iottag, AiSpanner and CSIRO in the Innovation Hour Shark Tank-style series of pitches.
