Abstract
With the mining industry constantly finding itself spinning in a rut of declining productivity as they fight to increase production, but fail to do so without excessive capital expenditure that promises longevity and potential to grow with the times. In an effort to stay on trend the mining industry did evolve to some extent where smart systems have proven to be extremely valuable, especially in the reliability management realm for mining. A system like MineCare® from Modular Mining has shown savings of $1.25 million in maintenance costs for a single year, excluding the indirect savings of prevented downtime events. Although reliability management has been a great advance in the industry to assist with improved operation time of mines with the introduction of preventative and predictive maintenance, they still find themselves in situations where unplanned downtime events take much longer than they have to due to the need for human reaction and intervention.
This realization has probed the connection between the applications and availability of drones and the need the mining industry finds itself with. The ability to cover vast areas in short times and offer real-time data as required makes drone systems an asset that may promise massive Return on Investment (ROI) and growth potential for mining operations. With drones adding to the success of Amazon and the retail industry, industries like agriculture, disaster relief, construction and many more have benefitted from the implementation of drones as part of their workforce. The mining industry, although slightly slower and more limited in its implementation, have been using drones successfully for 3D mapping operations, quantity surveying of stockpiles, slope angle calculations in open-pit operations, blast pattern determination, etc. Kumba Iron ore in the Northern Cape, South Africa is the first local mine to successfully license and implemented the use of drones as part of their operations without the need for third party contractors. This achievement is pivotal for the proposal of a drone system that could operate as a part of day-to-day operations.
The use of a smart drone system does not suggest replacing humans, but rather taking away certain responsibilities that can be fulfilled by a system that is much faster and more efficient. This will allow the normal workforce to focus more on the work they specialize in and this will also offer opportunity for improvement and upskilling of employees. The conceptual design of this system would incorporate Machine Learning (ML) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN’s) for data analysis together with already available data from Condition Monitoring (CM) systems that are in place. The proposal of a drone system that can be deployed as soon as the central control room receives an alarm signal, suggests that significant time saving is possible, together with a capability of real-time diagnostics as data processing by computers is much faster than any human would be able to process.
As with many other Forth Industrial Revolution (4IR) concepts, this solution may require a large capital investment, but the use of drones in mining has been proven efficient and value-adding. The payback period of this concept will vary from mine to mine, but based on the
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amount of money the mines lose on downtime events and the fact that a system like this can significantly decrease the total downtime and improve general efficiency of previously tedious processes, it can pay for itself within a few prevented downtime events, or even simply decreased downtime events.
It is important to remember that the use of drones on mines can be extrapolated to multitudes of applications within the mining industry and that the specific conceptual discussion in this report is only touching on a single opportunity for the use of this technology. The nature of 4IR is that system optimization is desired across all industries and applications, and that certain ideas and concepts are very much interchangeable with very little modification needed.
The mining industry is in need of optimized operations and the implementation of a concept that makes use of existing technologies like this can definitely set off an avalanche of potential and growth in the mining industry.