Trolex, the UK-based global supplier of gas detection and environmental monitoring equipment, has been working with their Turkish Distributor, MTM (Makina Ticaret Mumessillik Musavirlik), to supply Turkish Coal Enterprises Western Lignite Establishment Management (TKI GLI) with a Sentro 8 Sensorstation for use on their new development, the ‘Madrob-1’, a robot used to aid in the early stages of rescue planning and response, in the event of a mining accident.
Using the Sentro 8 and on-board cameras, Madrob-1 can enter potentially dangerous environments, ahead of rescuers to evaluate the gas levels and safety of the mine, helping rescuers determine how they should proceed.
Sentro 8 is so named as it can accommodate up to 8 pre-calibrated gas or remote sensing modules. These sensors are intelligent ‘plug-and-play’ modules, each with its own processor for intelligent data storage and signal conditioning circuits with a capacity to store up to 4,000 points of data. The system is designed to continuously collect and display the sensing data, store the full service history such as data logging, calibration, failure modes and alarm settings, and run self-diagnostic checks.
The modules are also designed to be simply replaced with pre-calibrated modules whenever required, making maintenance, service and calibration straightforward. Trolex says Sentro 8 was chosen for this project “as its design is the most compact on the market for its exceptional functionality. It monitors the data coming from multiple gas sensors with a single system. The flexibility of the system allows custom sensor configuration and removes the need of using different equipment when the types of measured gases or ambient variables are changed.”
In addition installing the Sentro 8 is easy and the replacement of the sensing modules are simple due to their ‘plug and play’ property making maintenance very straightforward. The Sentro 8 sensor data is easily integrated into mine-wide management systems using the ModBus protocol, where it can be processed, monitored and analysed according to requirements.