FUTURE MINING AND UNDERGROUND AUTOMATION
“ Wireless communication in mines presents unique and significant challenges, and underground mines are particularly demanding. Traditional underground communications solutions offer limited speed and bandwidth and tend to be costly.” It has just announced the availability of high performance, cost effective wireless networks for underground mines.
3D-P’ s underground wireless solution leverages readily available ruggedised network components that are well proven in the mining environment. The solution can provide continuous network access throughout the mine and provides full 802.11n network speeds at cost effective pricing. The 3D-P solution does not require continuous cables routed through the mine as do traditional leaky feeder systems and the radios only require access to power to operate. Being wireless, the solution offers much greater flexibility for being easily reconfigured as the mine expands.
“ Constantly increasing levels of automation in our mines, and the requirement for real time tracking of the location of the mine’ s assets and people have increased the criticality of an underground mines’ network. We believe that the 3D-P wireless network solution will extend the high level of performance and reliability that 3D- P networks have provided to surface mines to underground mines as well” says Ron White, 3D- P’ s Chief Technology Officer.“ We believe that the greater flexibility, performance and cost effectiveness of our wireless solution will provide great value to our underground clients”.
3D-P wireless connectivity makes the Internet of Things( IoT) a reality for mining. Through a complete range of wireless connectivity solutions, 3D-P ensures high performance of wireless networks and real-time access to critical production and asset health data, while 3D-P’ s Intelligent Endpoint( IEP) product line provides powerful edge computing, for optimal management of operations.
An underground mine in Brazil presented significant challenges to the successful deployment of a wireless network. Establishing a network was particularly important to the active stopes, where connectivity and throughput demands are high, and no wired infrastructure existed. A lack of infrastructure throughout the mine levels, very little power supply, and a lack of Ethernet on all levels further limited wireless connectivity.
The solution was a Rajant Kinetic Mesh™ Private Wireless Network. 3D-P was the Test & Kinetic Mesh Solutions Partner( KMSP).
Levels are connected by a tight spiral ramp that limits the distance wireless communications can travel. 3D-P’ s White tested five solutions, with mesh technology from Rajant and three other vendors. In order to test the impact of the
Boart Longyear’ s MDR700 brings much greater mobility to underground core drilling. It’ s a timesaver when moving from hole to hole using a diesel powered four-wheel drive carrier. During field trials, the average time to move the MDR700 rig from hole to hole proved to be up to 80 % faster than a regular underground exploration rig. The carrier features three available steering modes – four-wheel, two-wheel, and crab-like movement. This unique design feature makes manoeuvring the rig underground easier and faster. The rig is easy to navigate and can move at up to 10 km / h. For improved visibility and safety, multiple cameras are located on the rig and viewed / monitored from the cabin of the carrier
spiral design, White created two test environments. He conducted the first onsite at the mine. In this test, he set up an infrastructure radio at one end and tested it against different radios and antennas, monitoring signal strength and throughput, and then continued around the spiral to measure how far he could get without the signal faltering. In this test, as expected, the signal dropped quickly when line of site was lost.
White used a non-working mine of the same design in the USA for the second test. Using a radiating cable, a Rajant 2.4 GHz radio and two 5 GHz antennas on the spiral, he was able to maintain connectivity all around the spiral, up to a distance of 500 m. White did not lose bandwidth with the Rajant dual radio because the InstaMesh ® protocol allows the traffic to traverse a multihop network by switching radios at each hop, preventing throughput loss. Multiple Ethernet systems provided additional, and necessary, redundancy. Based on these results, White recommended Rajant’ s technology.
Specifically, he devised a highly effective plan that involved placing multiple Rajant nodes at each level, connecting them to the Ethernet switch, and meshing them with the rest of the infrastructure on that level. At each spiralling ramp, radiating cable connects the mesh networks on each level, ensuring redundancy as the core network can now be accessed on either level, preventing a single point of failure. A second level of redundancy was achieved by placing the individual radios at distances throughout the mine so that should a failure of a single node occur, a connection to the next radio in the tunnel could be established, although at reduced data rates.
In order to address the stope issue, White advised workers to place nodes on the vehicles, a mobile application for which Rajant’ s technology is perfectly suited. A battery-powered BreadCrumb ® was also recommended, that could be placed in strategic locations to provide connectivity to the core network. As the operators work in the stope area, these mobile nodes would maintain communications with the rest of the network.
“ I prefer Rajant’ s technology in this case. It enables communications to travel a minimum of 10 hops and maintain a robust network with the necessary high throughput these mining applications demand,” White said.
Another location based-decision support system that provides real-time positioning of vehicles, equipment and personnel in underground mines to maximise safety and productivity is ABB’ s Mine Location Intelligence™. It opens a new dimension to personal safety, reducing time for evacuation by showing the closest mining rescue chamber and the best emergency escape routes. It can also prevent people from accessing dangerous areas by providing automated surveillance.
Another dimension is related to production efficiency by using real-time location information for production control and mine automation. It can increase collaboration between personnel by integrating voice, message and CCTV services, available directly from the 3D view for better production efficiency.
GE’ s digital mine
GE notes that according to the Industrial Internet Insights Report for 2015( © 2014 General Electric,
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2014 Accenture) 97 % of miners put Big Data as a top 5 priority. Terabytes of data are being
14 International Mining | APRIL 2017