CRCMining Australia: Mining Research, Coal Mining, Mechanical Engineering Research Australia

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Safety
There were no safety incidents or accidents this Quarter.

Centre Overview
A number of important technologies will be demonstrated during 2007.The AcuMine HaulcheckTM system, using scanning lasers and PVC poles to monitor the position of trucks on mine haul roads, has been in routine use at Alcoa’s Huntly and Willowdale mines for more than a year. In February Eduardo Nebot’s team updated the hardware on the trucks at Willowdale giving these vehicles mesh network capability. These trucks now communicate constantly with each other and with one light vehicle also fitted with the technology. Each of these vehicles now knows where the others are at all times. This is both a safety feature and a cost-effective fleet monitoring arrangement. The plan is to fit all vehicles in the mine with this technology. Later this year all vehicles and mine personnel will be fitted with an RFID tagging system that will give warning to truck drivers when light vehicles and people are in close proximity to the trucks.
The next field trial of the tight-radius drilling (TRD) system will take place in March. This gas drainage technology, which is jointly owned by BHP Mitsui Coal and CRCMining, had been licensed in Australia and New Zealand to BHP Billiton. Late last year this license was transferred to AGL. Previous field trials with the TRD system have shown that this technology has significant potential for producing methane and other gases from coal seams. However, the ability to reliably and consistently drill lateral holes to the required length has been missing. During the past 12 months some of the components of the TRD system have been redesigned, much of the other equipment has been overhauled and improved. This work has all been directed towards improving the system reliability. We expect Glen Davidson’s team to demonstrate the commercial viability of this system during this field trial at CH4’s Moranbah site.
 The initial field trial the operator fatigue baseball cap being developed by Daniel Bongers and Eddie Otto will take place in April on a mine site in Australia. Assuming that this trial is successful we expect that the subsequent trial will be conducted on one of Phelps Dodge’s mine sites later this year. This very exciting technology, which monitors the cap wearer’s state of “awakeness”, could contribute substantially to safety in many industries, not just mining.
 Preliminary results of the two-way emergency communications system being developed by Bart Pienaar and Deryck Lauf look very promising. They plan to conduct proof-of-concept testing at the UQ experimental mine in Indooroopilly in March and April. If successful these will be followed by further testing in a deeper underground Australian mine and, later this year, at a Peabody mine, probably in the USA.

We are working with Rio Tinto to develop an automated blasthole drill at Pilbara Iron’s West Angeles operation. The complementary aspect of this project is to make real-time measurements of rock properties from data collected during the drilling process. The goal is to use this rock property information to improve blast design and blasting performance. This major project with Rio Tinto is led by Dihon Tadic from UQ and Charles McHugh from Rio. The drill automation work is being conducted the field robotics group at Sydney Univer­sity led by Ross Hennessy and is proceeding well. The rock interpretation work is being led by Peter Hatherly, also of Sydney University. A com­prehensive experiment was conducted at West Angeles on the rock recognition task and analysis of data collected is currently underway. Fifty six blastholes were monitored. In addition to the usual parameters of torque, thrust and penetration rate, data was collected from a sensor pack of 5 acceler­ometers measuring vibration on the rotary drilling head. Most of these holes were drilled percussively but 20 were rotary drilled. Geophysical logging of the blastholes was performed after the drilling operation. Core holes were drilled adjacent to seven of the holes to obtain details on the stratigraphy of the bench. Preliminary analysis of these data indicate that it should be possible to characterise the different rock types and to obtain rock property data – to improve the fragmentation from blasting – from real-time measurements made on the drill.

Joy Manufacturing is fabricating a prototype oscillating disc cutting (ODC) based mining system to operate in 1 m high stopes in the platinum mines in South Africa. Trials are planned in May for this machine to cut a concrete wall installed for this purpose in Joy’s factory in Johannesburg. Later this year this machine will be used in quarry trials, and subsequently underground trials, cutting in the two major platinum reefs. Zhiqiang Guan leads the CRCMining team in our ODC work.

Ross McAree, newly appointed as the P&H chair of mechanical engineering at UQ, is working with P&H to upgrade the software on their Payload Plus product. The new software will be trialed at two field trial sites in March, one at the Caballo mine in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and the other at the Callide mine in Queensland.

Ross is also leading a new $1.5m ACARP Project. ACARP has agreed to fund a major joint project with CRCMining and CSIRO to further the work in shovel automation. The technology is conceived as a “cruise control system” for shovel operators, that:

  • Takes control of the machine from the operator at the completion of digging;
  • Automatically swings to position the dipper over the dump point using real-time, sensor-based, path-planning methods to generate and adapt the motion trajectory and locate the dipper accurately at the dump point;
  • Releases the load without spillage; then
  • Swings back to the digging face, en-route returning the dipper to the tuck position and allowing the operator to seamlessly re-take control in preparation for the next dig.

These shovel technologies will be developed and demonstrated in a ongoing field trial over the next two years at the Bracalba quarry in Brisbane.

In August Matt Stockwell’s team will conduct the first field demonstration of the borehole discing project at BMA’s Peak Downs mine. The objective of this ACARP-supported project is to cut a dinner plate shaped slot at the toe, and orthogonal to the axis, of overburden blastholes. The purpose is to channel the blast energy to propagate a planar fracture above the coal seam; thereby mini­mising damage to the seam and eliminating the significant problem of throwing some of the valuable seam onto the low wall. In this trial 20 contiguous holes, from a total of 160 holes to be blasted, will be disced using our patented high pressure water jet apparatus.

Summary
It is apparent that this year represents an exciting period in the Centre’s history. Not all of these field trials will be an outstanding success. Some may fail, others will require a return to the laboratory and more basic research before venturing into a further, expensive, field testing phase. Nevertheless, each of these technologies has the potential to radically improve the mining process. If even one of them makes it to the point of a commercial product in 2007, it will have been a great year.


Mike Hood, CEO, CRCMining