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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OCTOBER 2017 • E&MJ; 69 www.e-mj.com OPERATING STRATEGIES tant datasets to quantify extracted volumes of piles and stacks of excavated material. As a result, Kumba has been able to make several improve- ments to the Sishen mine's workfl ow. These include: • The ability to make informed decisions about the nature and lo- cation of machinery and other resource deployments on the site. • Developing an all-in-one solution to monitor dump sites, excava- tion and infrastructure, plan operations, track progress, as well as form a better overall visualization of the mine. • Identifying changes in the fi eld, the management team can now remotely calculate the volume of the stacks and piles with just a few mouse clicks. • The ability to get the required data faster than ever before and through traditional methods. They can make decisions in a timelier and secured manner. For Kumba, monitoring an area of 100 km 2 is no longer a challenge — and, after incorporating Stack Insight, Kumba has decided to integrate it into their Komela mine, as well. While ground-based surveying will always be a valuable min- ing tool, satellite imaging is a cost-effective alternative service. It has the additional advantage that satellite imaging eliminates the need to deploy teams of expensive experts into remote areas, eliminating unreliable tasks and allowing decision makers to fo- cus on optimizing extracted volumes in a timely, accurate and user-friendly fashion. ChloŽ Leclerc is mining industry manager at Airbus. Based on the previous images, changes are now detected. The pink color indicates where mine surfaces have changed, showing how material was moved in one month. Now that surface movements were detected (with the change detection), the extracted volume can be calculated with Stack Insight's volume calculation capability. By using information from the satellite images captured on two dates and the detected surface changes, volumes can be calculated remotely.