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KITCHENER — Inside a Conestoga College lab, Jim Kendall is building a device that could revolutionize mineral exploration — a camera that detects gold in rock samples.
Kendall calls it the Gold Sniffer. He co-founded a company, Kendall Technology, to bring his remarkable idea it to market. If all goes well in the coming months, the first Gold Sniffers will be ready next May and a more sophisticated version will come out next fall. Each will sell for about $55,000.
Kendall’s unique background and boundless curiosity led to his idea that a camera could be turned into a small, portable device that quickly and accurately determines if there is gold in the mineral samples collected by prospectors.
Currently, prospectors collect samples in the bush, which are then sent to an assay lab that conducts tests to confirm the presence of gold. It can take a month to get results. Between 50 and 90 per cent of the samples tested in the assay lab contain no gold.
Kendall believes the Gold Sniffer could quickly change all that. “The exploration geologist then in a couple of minutes right there on the site has the information about whether the sample has gold, how big the particles are, and the minerals associated with it,” he says.
So far, Kendall has three patents on the technology and five more pending.
When work started at Conestoga College in January 2012, Kendall’s team included Jack Cole, a professor in electronics systems engineering, and one student.
Today, the team also includes Karen Cain, who has a PhD in mechanical engineering from the University of Waterloo and started the mechanical systems engineering program at Conestoga. It also includes Conestoga students and a post-doctoral student at Laurentian University in Sudbury.
The Gold Sniffer project received $515,000 in development funding from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council in 2013. It also has received support from the Ontario Centres of Excellence.
Typically, it takes two to five years to develop new technology. Then a decision is made whether to build a prototype and commercialize the technology.
“Because Conestoga has these very practical skills of building hardware-software, mechanical design, optical design, and all of that, we are actually able to build the prototype that will eventually be sold,” Kendall says. “That more or less cut the time to market in half.”
If Conestoga helped move the technology forward, the Gold Sniffer is close to becoming reality because of Kendall’s boy-like wonder of the physical world and a family tradition steeped in the romance of prospecting and mining. He has family roots in Cobalt, a small town in northeastern Ontario that had more millionaires than Toronto during a silver-mining boom there at the beginning of the 20th century.
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