Smart Industry 1/2020

IoT in Mining
Deep connectivity
Almost a mile below ground in an iron mine in northern Sweden,
human operators control what is going on and plan their attack on valuable
seams of iron ore. But unlike the hands-on extraction of decades past,
these mining professionals are sitting in an office a thousand
kilometers away, relying on IoT sensors, cameras, underground Long-Term
Evolution (LTE) networks, and a powerful private cloud to guide
their blasting and tunneling in real time.
n By Eamon Earls
source ©: Boliden
The company deploys sensors
on drill strings to gather data and
combine it with preexisting measurements
to inform blasting plans.
Datacloud works closely with European
mining companies, chiefly
those headquartered in London,
that often have the most technologically
sophisticated operations
in very large mines in Canada or
Australia. In addition to sensors on
drill strings, vehicle and equipment
manufacturers are at the head of
the pack, with heavy-haul trucks
and excavators being increasa
potential tunnel collapse, IoT is
mainly being used to help mines
plan and become more efficient.
“Basically, companies drill hundreds
of thousands of holes in the ground,
fill them with explosive, blow it up,
and then dig the fragmented rock
pile. Globally, mining companies
are responsible for $400bn a year
in operational spending [much of
it on basic extraction],” says Daniel
Palmer, chief operating officer of
Datacloud, an IoT services company
focused on improving the characterization
of the geology of mines.
Drilling for Data
Sensors on drill
strings gather data
and combine it with
existing measurement
systems to
improve blasting
plans. GPS tracking
also makes for better
machine health.
source ©: Datacloud
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