Real Time Mine

The genesis of this project came from working as a vacation mining engineering student at an open cut coal mine in rural NSW. During my placement I found that the super large mining trucks used in open cut mines were not being used to their full potential. The main reason for this being that operators had no easy way of monitoring the payload during the loading process. This caused over-loading and under-loading trucks to be a frequent occurrence.

Further research into payload management systems showed there was a lack of low cost ways to solve this problem. Current systems available on the market rely on radio telemetry equipment and expensive custom made electronics. In its most basic form, a radio telemetry system used to monitor payloads cost over $4,000 per vehicle, and a system used to monitor production rates and other information beginning at $30,000 per vehicle. This inspired me to create a mobile device based product to monitor payloads and provide basic production information to operators and supervisors at mine sites.

The prototype that was made over this weekend proves the concept of a mobile devices based system. Using a bluetooth link, two devices were paired and used to simulate the transfer of data from the trucks on-board scales to a display in the excavator cabin. Given the close range of the machines during the loading process bluetooth was considered adequate, but if this proves to be false during product testing, a direct wifi link could be adopted.

Currently this prototype solves the problem of payload management when loading mining trucks, but is considered the starting point in a larger system. Using the same short range communication it is possible to record material movements, production rates and operator performance. The plan is to share this data collected at the excavators device long range, to allow real time monitoring by supervisors and managers anywhere in the mine. The end result being a production management system costing less than $1000 per vehicle in hardware, with the software sold under a subscription based model. Currently only 15% of the 40,000 mining trucks worldwide use a production management system. The introduction of a low cost system delivering this much value has the potential to dominate this market.