Engineering & Mining Journal

OCT 2017

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SLOPE STABILITY 50 E&MJ; • OCTOBER 2017 www.e-mj.com ary. "You can add battery and generator modules," de Beer said. "You can take that and you can mount it on a trailer or a pickup truck that allows you to quickly move from monitoring a critical mining area to then go and quickly monitor a waste dump and come back to a tailings dam." A unit can be transported by, for example, a trailer to new site "and within 30 minutes the system can be completely georeferenced and already be doing criti- cal monitoring," he said. Or, he said, "you can mount it on a concrete block where a permanent solution is required." The system is empowered by software functionality, called Rapid Align, which enables quick georeferencing. "If, for ex- ample, you have been monitoring a spe- cific area and you take the system away and you bring it back at a later stage, and deploy it in the same vicinity where it used to be, when you scan the same area on the slope, the Rapid Align software will automatically align all the old data with all the new data," de Beer said. "It is seamless to the user, who does not have to provide manual alignment of data." Ensuring the processing of that data oc- curs instantly, the units feature edge-com- puting capabilities. "The advanced paral- lel computing architecture processes data while actively scanning," the company reported. That is to say the unit itself pro- cesses all the scan information, translating the analog data into useful digital informa- tion, de Beer said. "That information has been provided from the signal processor to the data processor, where all the informa- tion is stored," he said. The data can be stored on the unit for a month or more. It is up to the user to determine where to analyze and archive it. "The user can run automatic backup algo- rithms where the data is transferred from the radar onto a server, and then the user can have data from the last couple of years that he can use for analysis purposes," he said. "What we do automate is the backup of the data from the radar to the server." Edge computing enables the unit to generate alarms. Alarms are set by the user and can be customized and modi- fied as needed. "You can alarm on slopes moving toward or away," de Beer said. "You can alarm on the velocity of move- ment. You can alarm on average time win- dows, to name just a few." The system employs the company's Scatter X software for processing image resolution, correcting for atmospheric changes, and as a user interface. Re- garding the image resolution processing, "whereas previously a single data point in range was reported for each scan point, with Scatter X, a magnitude of points is now processed in each range bin and displayed," the company reported. That means the information conveyed is de- fined by "millions of data points," en- suring that "smaller failure mechanisms can be tracked with the highest level of confidence," the company reported. To put small failures into perspective, Scatter X leverages data from third-party databases. Data can be tapped from, for example, a wire-line extensometer that captures movement as a crack opens. "What we do is, when we access the data- base, we actually take into account where the wire-line extensometer is situated and we recalculate what the vector of move- ment would have been if it was directly in line with the radar," de Beer said. "And that is what we display to the users so that they can compare apples to apples." Some of those apples may be sub- bench failures detected from a distance of 4 kilometers, de Beer said. "Over our full operational range capability, we can detect small failures." Meanwhile, million-data-point resolu- tion "combined with shorter scan times allow for better correction of atmospheric effects, yielding a cleaner and more accu- rate representation of the displacement of the slope surface," the company report- ed. The software technically runs multi- ple weather-correcting algorithms, provid- ing "a variety of options to the client," de Beer said. For example, "we can allow the system to do atmospheric compensa- tion automatically, or we can designate a specific area in the slope that is not mov- ing," he said. "The user will select it as a stable region and we will use that as a barometer for trying to determine what the atmosphere is doing." The atmospheric correction function - ality enables the series to operate in tem- peratures that range from -50°C to 55°C and up to 5,000 m above sea level. Commissioning is done by a Reu- tech-accredited technician, and operator training is provided by either a Reutech trainer or a Reutech-accredited distrib- uter. After that, Reutech consults on the processes centered on the system. "We need to come up with a custom solution for them to make sure the system is still maintained based on our factory guide- lines," de Beer said. "We also provide 24-hour call centers and we will bring the support at all times day or night." Software That Automates Analysis A radar system can capture real-time data. It can be augmented by imagery taken by, for example, a drone. Synthesiz- ing both data sets into models that can be used to analyze slope failures before they happen can be accomplished by any one of a handful software solutions available. A quick summary of a couple reveals the types of tools and powers now offered. A 3-D Model With a 'Solve' Button TAGAsoft's 3-D slope stability analysis software (as a service) offering, TSLOPE, is unique in that it was "designed and developed as a 3-D system," said Dr. Ian Brown, managing director. "Some 3-D slope stability packages build their models from sections, rather than use 3-D surfaces. In some packages, the user needs to determine the direction of slid- ing before carrying out the stability anal- ysis." TSLOPE enables users to conduct crucial analyses earlier in the timeline, and to carry it out in 3-D "in minutes, rather than days," Brown said. TSLOPE users can work in 2-D or 3-D, and can, if needed, create 3-D models from 2-D sections. Conversely, the soft- ware can automatically generate 2-D sec- tions from a 3-D model, and then analyze them using either Spencer's Method or the Ordinary Method of Columns. TAGAs- oft lauds the software's automated func- tionalities, which include back-calcula- tion of failures, calculation of local factors of safety (FoS), searches for critical fail- ure surfaces, and corresponding searches for the critical seismic coefficient. TSLOPE can be used in conjunction with an active slope measuring system, Brown said. A radar or laser monitoring system-based model can be imported to provide one surface. To build a model for stability analysis of a possible criti - cal failure surface, "we need a minimum of two surfaces," he said. The second data source could be a drone. "We take the cloud of points derived from the or- thorectified photographs captured by the drone, and import them into TSLOPE,"

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