https://www.miningweekly.com

Company says offering has safety, productivity benefits

19th June 2015

By: Anine Kilian

Contributing Editor Online

  

Font size: - +

The Department of Mineral Resources’ (DMR’s) health and safety regulations, which are currently under review, are expected to provide some direction on contentious issues such as mining companies’ liability regarding their health and safety obligations, as well as the ability to safely slow down and stop a vehicle in underground and openpit mines without the need for human intervention.

The first stage of this legislation came into being last month and further updates will be gazetted in due course. Soon, all underground and openpit mines will have to implement safety solutions that comply with these new regulations.

Mine safety solutions provider Minetec commercial development GM Alan Fenelon tells Mining Weekly that the company offers, as a DMR-compliant baseline, its Safe Detect system.

“The system is a vehicle-to- vehicle and vehicle-to-person configurable safety system which can incorporate high-precision tracking technology that benefits both safety as well as productivity. Both systems share a common hardware platform, allowing Safe Detect and Minetec’s productivity solution known as SMARTS to reside on the same infrastructure.”
On the productivity side, Fenelon notes that a mine creates a long-term and short-term plan and, ultimately, a single shift plan to attain the long-term plan outcomes.

He adds that Minetec’s SMARTS can assist mines in achieving such outcomes by creating a simulation of the shift, and then developing a shift schedule, which can be delivered to the shift boss at the mine face.
The controller on the surface can monitor the shift in real time, which enables the controller to effectively see what the shift boss sees, Fenelon says, noting that, should an incident threaten the schedule, the controller will know about it immediately and can act accordingly.
He adds that the return on investment is driven by cost decreases and productivity improvements for the miner because the miner improves how it reconciles planned and actual mine shifts over time, and continually improves its reaction to changing circumstances.

“In many mines today, the shift progress is supplied on a sometimes unreliable voice system or is reported many hours later at the end of the shift. The mine can sometimes only know what took place 12 hours after the shift has ended,” he notes, adding that even the radio solution is sometimes flawed, as the ability to resimulate and reschedule takes long and is often not revised fast enough to be effective within that shift.

Fenelon states that the Minetec Unified Platform (MUP) is the underlying infrastructure for safety and productivity solutions and is largely based on a technology Minetec has developed in conjunction with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.
He states that Minetec has taken this technology, known as Wireless Ad Hoc System for Positioning (WASP) and has commercially certified, adapted and ruggedised it for specific use in harsh conditions such as underground mining operations.
“The WASP node is multifunctional and can track moving assets with an accuracy of less than 1m in real time. These nodes can be static or mobile, on a person or piece of equipment,” he says.
The node also acts as a wireless mesh communications system underground and provides a moveable backhaul of data from the mine face to above ground in real time by passing data from person to vehicle to ceiling until it reaches a Wi-Fi hot spot

He mentions that Minetec goes to various sites, where it uses the MUP to determine the best configuration for each project and deploys a safety solution that can incorporate a productivity solution.

He says this value proposition is a world-first because, normally, safety is an expense that does not necessarily provide a return on investment for an organisation.

“We currently have an ongoing live deployment of our very basic safety solution at platinum miner Aquarius Platinum. The installation at Aquarius will be completed next month,” he says.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

Comments

The content you are trying to access is only available to subscribers.

If you are already a subscriber, you can Login Here.

If you are not a subscriber, you can subscribe now, by selecting one of the below options.

For more information or assistance, please contact us at subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za.

Option 1 (equivalent of R125 a month):

Receive a weekly copy of Creamer Media's Engineering News & Mining Weekly magazine
(print copy for those in South Africa and e-magazine for those outside of South Africa)
Receive daily email newsletters
Access to full search results
Access archive of magazine back copies
Access to Projects in Progress
Access to ONE Research Report of your choice in PDF format

Option 2 (equivalent of R375 a month):

All benefits from Option 1
PLUS
Access to Creamer Media's Research Channel Africa for ALL Research Reports, in PDF format, on various industrial and mining sectors including Electricity; Water; Energy Transition; Hydrogen; Roads, Rail and Ports; Coal; Gold; Platinum; Battery Metals; etc.

Already a subscriber?

Forgotten your password?

MAGAZINE & ONLINE

SUBSCRIBE

RESEARCH CHANNEL AFRICA

SUBSCRIBE

CORPORATE PACKAGES

CLICK FOR A QUOTATION