Gold Mine Laboratory LIMS

A gold mine laboratory serves two masters at once. Exploration and resource geology need large drill-core campaigns processed with defensible QA/QC; the operating mine needs grade control and plant samples turned around on a fixed cadence, every day, because ore routing and reconciliation decisions wait on the numbers. OnLIMS models both kinds of work explicitly — batch jobs for campaigns, routine jobs for the daily cycle — on one database, with one chain of custody.

The gold sample workflow, end to end

The path from the rock to the reported grade is mostly physical, and every hand-off is a chance to lose sample identity. OnLIMS keeps the link intact at each step:

• Registration & barcode Drill-core and plant samples registered with unique IDs and barcode labels at reception; client metadata and work orders attached from the start.
• Sample preparation Drying, crushing, splitting and pulverizing tracked with preparation control — split weights and sieve tests recorded against the sample, not on paper.
• Fire assay Pulp and flux weighings captured directly from balances (including fire assay balances with auto-tare), worksheets holding furnace sequence through fusion and cupellation.
• Instrument finish AAS and ICP-OES/MS results captured through serial (RS-232) or file-based interfaces and mapped automatically onto worksheet positions — no transcription between the spectrometer and the LIMS.
• QA/QC validation OnQC evaluates CRMs, blanks and duplicates in real time with Shewhart, X-Control, CUSUM and Thompson-Howarth charts; a 3SD failure blocks sign-off until it is resolved and justified.
• Approval & reporting Results move Pending → Ready → Approved → Published under supervisor control, lock on publish, and feed the Certificate of Analysis and downstream exports automatically.

Grade control on a clock

Grade control assays are only useful while the bench they describe is still being mined. OnLIMS routine jobs schedule the fixed sampling points of the operation — blast holes, plant streams, concentrate and tails — by date and time, so the laboratory's day is laid out before the samples arrive. Because instrument output lands directly in the worksheet and QA/QC is evaluated in the run rather than at the end of the shift, a failed standard is caught while the batch is still in the lab, not after the numbers have reached the pit.

Numbers the metallurgical accountant can defend

Reconciliation between mine, plant and laboratory falls apart when a reported grade cannot be traced back through its weighings and instrument readings. In OnLIMS every published result carries a field-level audit trail — old value, new value, user, timestamp — from reception to certificate. Published data flows out as CSV, TXT, XLSX or XML, through ODBC, or via configured exports to ERP, historian and mine planning systems, and clients see read-only results through the LabData portal.

Built for the mine site, not just the head office

Remote gold operations run OnLIMS through Citrix or Microsoft RDS against a central SQL Server — a thin-client session instead of large data transfers over a satellite link. Deployment is zero-install: executables run from a shared folder, with no local registry entries to maintain at site. Active Directory single sign-on and role-based access apply consistently across every laboratory in the operation.

Frequently asked questions

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