Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr
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SUPPLIERS REPORT Rail-Veyor points out that the concept is designed for materials handling, and that Vale's installation has been adapted to suit a rapid development project. However, the big benefit lies in the fact that once production gets under way, the transport infrastructure will already be in place, the company added. In terms of energy usage, Rail-Veyor claims that its system requires between 0.2 and 0.3 kWh/mt-km, depending on any gradients along the route. By contrast, it says, overland conveyors use 0.5-0.7 kWh, slurry pipelines 0.6-0.8 kWh and offroad trucks 0.9-1.2 kWh/mt-km. Penguin Extends Communications Capabilities Based near Sudbury, Ontario, Penguin Automated Systems Inc. is both developing robotics for mining, and inventing new ways of communicating with remotely operated equipment. Chairman and Chief Technology Officer Dr. Greg Baiden told E&MJ; that his involvement in automation goes back to developing Inco's autonomous 70-mt-capacity underground mine truck, which operated successfully between 1989 and 1994. Penguin ASI's most recent project, he said, has been the construction of a control center for a leach-pad stacker at Codelco's www.e-mj.com Radimiro Tomic copper mine in Chile. Scheduled for delivery late this year, the system will use WiMAX technology to communicate data but also, more importantly, will act as a testbed for Penguin's optical communication system. Baiden explained that conventional WiFi network used to control multiple video and data sources will quickly run out of bandwidth. "If you want to run a stacker, a bucketwheel excavator and spreader, you need 12 to 14 video channels per machine, and wireless systems out there currently can't handle that," he said. "As you move away from the antenna, data rates drop exponentially, and if you want to control machines and need full broadcast video and real-time control with joysticks, you can't do it with transmission rates of 2 megabits a second." One of the key criteria, he added, is the need for very tight constraints on controlresponse delay times; Inco's requirement for its mine truck in the 1980s was less than 50 milliseconds. By way of finding a solution, the company is investigating the potential of light as the communications routing, using solid-state LED-based optical transceivers that can operate in both air and under water. Using a conical-shaped light dome at each end of the communications link, Baiden said, the problem of light directionality has been overcome, allowing the system to provide coverage in an area much in the same way as mobile-phone network aerials—even in direct full sunlight. The company demonstrated some of its communications and robotic designs, including remotely operated equipment for work in potentially hazardous situations. Earlier this year, it took a set of robotic scanning equipment to Codelco's Andina mine, running profiling trials on one of the mine's drawpoint levels. Mounted on an eight-wheel carrier that can traverse rough ground and up to 45° slopes, the system includes a 10-m-long telescopic boom that carries 3-D laser scanners that are accurate to 1 cm. Supporting the reconnaissance vehicle is a telecommunications robot, also mounted on an eight-wheel chassis, that provides the wireless links to the control center, with relay beacons providing extra links where the two vehicles are out of line-of-sight with each other. Scanning data were processed to provide highly accurate images of individual entries, as well as orepasses and drawpoints. DECEMBER 2012 • E&MJ; 87