Inspired by what happened at Lily Mine in South Africa, the work on locating and communicating with missing persons in mining has developed from one of Wits Mining Institute’s (WMI) research themes at DigiMine: working towards reliable, multi-purpose, wireless communication systems for underground mining. The aim is to position, track and communicate (through voice, data and visual media) with underground mine workers – using the existing WSN (Wireless Sensor Networks) network. The partner is the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at Wits, with Drs Asad Mahmood and Ling Cheng as experts. On the strength of this partnership, several students are contributing to ongoing research on this theme.

In further collaboration with Professor Anna Foerster at the Sustainable Communication Networks Laboratory (ComNets) at the University of Bremen in Germany, DigiMine is conducting the design, development and testing of a technology for tracking trapped miners. Idrees Zaman (visiting PhD candidate from Bremen University) and Godknows Musa (DigiMine researcher) are working in this area

A prototype system was developed by Zaman and demonstrated at WMI in November 2017. Because the technology ‘taps’ into the WSN of a mine, its range is potentially unlimited. WSNs combine through-the-rock, through-broken-earth and through-the-air communication systems and have the potential to re-establish communications through a self-healing process – even in a disaster scenario.

As a proof-of-concept, a collapse scene was created inside the Mock Mine and a network, based on custom-created WSN nodes, was deployed inside and outside the Mock Mine. Zaman demonstrated that, if the miner node is buried under a pile of debris, the WSN node is still able to transmit signals through the debris, solid rock and through voids, thus informing the rescuers about the position of the missing person.