Chart Industries Archives - International Mining

Howden’s transition into the wider Chart Industries offering is allowing it to branch into new territory; territory that it will be showcasing at MINExpo INTERNATIONAL® 2024 in Las Vegas later this month.

For over a century, Howden has supplied underground ventilation fans to every major global mining company. Today, its fully integrated ventilation air quality control approach can, it says, dramatically reduce energy usage by 50%.

Chart Industries, which Howden is now a part of following its acquisition in March 2023, says it is a leading global solutions provider to clean energy and industrial gas markets across the Nexus of Clean™ – clean power, clean water, clean food and clean industrials.

The combination between Chart and Howden is broadening business, according to Leo Botha, Director of Global Mining Sales at Chart.

“At Howden, we have traditionally focused on the underground mining sector, whereas Chart Industries has significant exposure to the surface mining industry,” he told IM.

The legacy Howden business supplies a variety of fans – main, booster and auxiliary fans – that provide versatility, economic advantages for efficiency and maintenance, low noise and outstanding aerodynamic performance. It combines this with mine cooling and mine heating systems to ensure the optimal solution for each mine site.

Underpinning this is the Ventsim® platform.

Ventsim DESIGN enables the 3D design, modelling and simulation of underground mine and tunnel ventilation systems with controls for safe and efficient operations. It originated as mining management software in 1993 and, today, ensures operations within mines and tunnels are safe and efficient through a suite of solutions.

Ventsim CONTROL is designed to reduce energy consumption, associated costs and improve energy efficiency in underground mining ventilation systems, supporting customers’ net-zero goals. The software suite uses advanced algorithms to analyse real-time data and adjust ventilation equipment to maximise energy savings while maintaining safe working conditions.

“We continue to enhance Ventsim capabilities and leverage advancement in technologies like AI,” Chart says. “We’re furthering our energy management and control tool kit and implementing a carbon calculator, building on the energy dashboards we have in place to visualise energy consumption, energy savings and, more recently, carbon emissions.”

The company can also highlight LNG and hydrogen storage, system, transport and fuelling options.

Chart provides LNG energy storage and fuel delivery solutions for natural gas power generation, on-board LNG fuel tanks for mine haul trucks and service vehicles, and related fuel station equipment. It now also offers the exact same solutions for energy and power generation using gaseous or liquid hydrogen with its onboard LH2 vehicle fuel tanks and fuel stations, LH2 storage tanks and vaporisers, H2 compressors and related supply chain equipment.

Botha says some of the early conversations with customers have already gone into specifics on how they can access some of these hydrogen solutions at their sites.

“Chart, which has a remit of ‘cleaning up’ the industries it works in, has hydrogen and LNG storage solutions that could allow these mines to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions drastically,” he said. “We’re now just looking to align on whether that may be hybrid solutions involving diesel and H2/LNG, or a single energy source.

“These solutions aren’t likely to be integrated at mine sites tomorrow, but they are commercially-available in other sectors and, in some instances, present a strong mining business case.”

In the field of carbon capture, utilisation and storage, Chart has significant knowledge of and solutions for the processes and challenges of energy-intensive, hard-to-abate industries such as mining and mineral processing.

Lastly, Chart’s water business, ChartWater™, can offer the most efficient, cost-effective, environmental solutions for contaminant removal, including antimony and arsenic, oxygenation for remediation of rivers/lakes/reservoirs, aerobic biological processes, pH control for mineral acid replacement, enhanced metal flotation and remineralisation, the company says.

Botha continued: “We look forward to continuing to offer our customers different commercial solutions and increased functionality. This, for instance, includes leasing and rental options – options that Howden customers have not previously had before becoming a part of Chart.”

Earlier this year, Howden’s Lead Software Engineer, Benoit Dussault, told IM that the company was starting to delve into machine learning as part of the evolution of Ventsim CONTROL, and he recently provided a few more details about the impact this could have on its flagship ventilation optimisation system.

The company’s aim for this project – as with all ongoing ventilation projects – is to optimise the flow of air and the other varying parameters that come with adequately ventilating underground mines.

Ventsim CONTROL has proven in the past to improve the ventilation process, with its highest level solution – level 5 – offering a ventilation on demand (VoD) solution bolstered by “optimisation algorithms”.

Dussault said the company is looking to bolster these algorithms with machine learning to help predict and detect certain parameters that influence the way mine ventilation systems work.

“With that, we could detect something that a sensor alone cannot do and analyse data to see things we could not see before,” he explained.

For instance, with Howden’s recently added temperature controllers for Ventsim CONTROL – both for cooling and heating purposes – the system could leverage machine-learning algorithms to predict how long it would take to reach a specific temperature sub point at an area of a mine, optimising the heat and airflow so that the set point is reached at the scheduled time.

This type of process reduces not only the energy consumption associated with ventilation but also the emissions associated with powering the processes.

“There is already optimisation happening with Ventsim CONTROL on a regular basis, but, with the assistance of machine learning and predictive modelling, we can optimise this further,” Dussault said.

As both software developers, engineers and mining practice leads, Howden, a Chart Industries Company, is well positioned to make the most of the industry’s machine-learning advances, according to Dussault.

“In the mining industry, there are a lot of PLC programmers and automation specialists, but very few of these are software developers,” he said. “I think we have much unique expertise to allow us to lead this adoption.”

To facilitate this move, Howden is moving Ventsim CONTROL over to a web-based user interface with BI Dashboards and reporting, making it easier to understand what the data is saying about potential ventilation optimisation advances.

Howden is currently evaluating the customer needs to build a machine-learning prototype that will be tested extensively in-house ahead of deployment at a mine site.

Feeding the algorithm with the right kind of data will be paramount to the project’s success, according to Dussault.

“No matter what you try to do with machine learning, if your data is wrong, your model will be wrong,” he said.

Chart, Howden ready to showcase a ‘ventilation and more’ offering at MINExpo

Howden strives for further ventilation on demand optimisation