Ian Brindle presents ColdBlock™ Laboratory Sample Digestion Technology to an audience at the recent Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference.

The Canadian start-up company ColdBlock^TM Technologies Inc. and its research partner, Brock University chemist Ian Brindle, unveiled their pioneering technology at the recent Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference.

This marks the first step in the company’s global launch of its ColdBlock^TM Laboratory Sample Digestion Technology, which has the potential to revolutionize the mining industry by offering a cheaper, faster and cleaner way to conduct mineral and ore analysis.

“ColdBlock Digestion offers mining operations a new alternative to achieve productivity gains,” Brindle says.

The analysis process, called digestion, involves dissolving samples in order to measure the amounts of economically valuable metals within them. Current conventional methods can take up to four hours or more to digest samples with toxic acids and acids that form explosive compounds.

But in its digestion method, the ColdBlock^TM technology instead uses infrared emitters to generate very high heat, which is absorbed by the sample particles directly, with impressive results.

“Digestions take less than 15 minutes and results are comparable with those from other, usually slower, digestion technologies,” Brindle explains. “Coupled with the elimination of perchloric acid, and the overall reduction in the volume of acids needed, makes ColdBlock^TM a greener and safer technology.”

“Today’s release of ColdBlock Digestion marks the first step in our company’s global launch,” Nick Kuryluk, CEO of ColdBlock^TM Technologies, said at the March 4 launch. “We aspire to become a leading sample digestion technology for the mining industry and look to expand into the environmental and other industries in the near future.”

For more information, see ColdBlock^TM Technologies Inc.’s website.