Enhanced Safety and Real-Time Emergency Response with GroundHog RTLS

Use case #1: Miner Safety

The essential use case is safety. For example, when an incident requires all underground personnel to evacuate, mines can rely on RTLS to ensure all personnel have safely moved to a mine rescue chamber or have come to the surface.  

A central control room can also monitor lone workers and keep track of the last known location of a miner. This level of awareness helps during mine rescue operations so the rescue team can narrow the search and rescue area.

RTLS allows for quick and accurate responses to any incidents that may occur.

The right technology also allows detecting if a miner is down possible. I will describe how to do so using BLE beacons. 

Use case #2: Locating equipment underground

Most mine operations monitor Equipment Availability and Utilization using a Time Utilization Model (TUM). When a mine seriously looks into increasing efficiency, they can pull two levers almost immediately: identify operating delays and standbys. Underground equipment sits on standby during shift change, so continuous improvement managers must look for ways to get butts-in-seats faster, thereby reducing standby times.

At shift change, locating equipment underground can often take over 20 minutes or more – especially if it is not the primary load-haul equipment. Using RTLS, a miner can visually identify the exact location of a piece of equipment at a shift change line-up meeting, thereby increasing overall effective shift time to more than 30 minutes per day.

Using simple back-of-the-envelope math: if a mine produces 2000 tons per day, assuming 21 hours of effective shift length, everything else being equal, you could achieve an additional 50 tons per day (approximately 2050 tons – or two additional truck loads). Of course, for many, load-haul equipment utilization is effective with concepts like hot-shift changes, etc. But unlocking an additional 30 minutes per shift across your workforce can improve overall productivity – think development, production, construction, electrical and mechanical ops.

Use case #3: Automated trip counting, material inventory and movement underground.

 Automated counting of trips to surface is the most straightforward use case to implement using RTLS hardware. For example, in a portal access mine, installing tracking beacons and readers on the equipment and at the portal entrance, you can count the number of times a haul truck went underground and returned to surface. The limitation is that you can’t tell whether the truck is loaded. Adding a payload sensor to track actual trips with tonnes solves this problem.

Many of our customers also install sensors on loading units and the ribs of ramps, headings, muck bays, and ore pass. So when a haul truck visits a particular loader (LHD / Bogger / Scoop depending on where you are reading this article), you can assume that it got loaded, along with the location, and the grade of material, so geologists can also track the material inventory and material movement underground.