Tag Archives: Epiroc

Epiroc provides the next ‘evolutionary step toward fully autonomous mining’

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Epiroc has introduced the fifth generation of its Rig Control System (RCS) on Pit Viper blasthole drills as it looks to equip miners with all of the tools to embrace full automation.

RCS 5 for Pit Viper blasthole drill rigs is the next “evolutionary step toward fully autonomous mining”, the company said upon launch of the system earlier this month at the Bauma fair in Munich, Germany.

Features such as Machine-to-Machine Communication, sharing real-time drill plan updates between drills, Auto Tower Angle and Integrated Camera View advanced awareness are some of the early features introduced, Epiroc said.

“Whether operating from a remote location or on-board the drill, the new and improved RCS 5 intuitive main menu creates a user-friendly experience that ultimately increases productivity. This new design allows the operator to focus on the task-at-hand and switch seamlessly between screens in a well-organised and dynamic environment.”

RCS 5’s new Drill Plan Generator function allows for creation and editing of drill plans on-board the rig or from a remote location quickly and easily, according to Epiroc. The new Drilling Data Screen, meanwhile, features real-time depth and penetration rate feedback with histogram for easy in-hole monitoring.

Tyler Berens, Product Line Manager, Automation at Epiroc Drilling Solutions, said: “We’re excited to continue our automation journey, pushing the limits in sustainable productivity. Launching the RCS 5 platform will allow our customers and partners to further advance their operations, saving valuable time and dollars while increasing predictability and safety with either on board or autonomous operations.

“Autonomous operations began with RCS 4, wait until you see where we take it with RCS 5.”

RCT fuel cap protection system finds its way to Northern Territory gold mine

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RCT has recently completed a project to install its fuel cap protection system at an underground mine in a remote part of the Northern Territory in Australia.

The gold mine’s fleet of 17 Epiroc MT6020 underground haul trucks are now equipped with RCT’s Muirhead® Fuel Cap Isolation system, which has been devised to prevent incidents when refuelling.

This protection system helps clients eliminate damage to refuelling bays and save money in downtime costs associated with operators accidentally driving off with the nozzle still attached, according to RCT.

“The implementation of the Fuel Cap Isolation system is just another way of safeguarding operators,” the company said.

Autonomous drill rigs, Oyu Tolgoi recognised in Epiroc awards

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Epiroc’s first annual awards have recognised close customer collaboration in Mongolia and innovative autonomous drill rigs in Australia.

Its “United in Performance Award” honours exceptional customer collaboration, the company said. This inaugural award is presented to Anders Berglund, Bayar Torguud, Batzorig Jamsranjav and Alf Lawrence at Epiroc’s Customer Center in Mongolia, as well as to mining company Oyu Tolgoi LLC.

“Their far-reaching collaboration is boosting productivity and safety at Oyu Tolgoi’s major copper mine,” Epiroc said. “With the mine located remotely in the South Gobi desert, Epiroc has developed strong local service capabilities, yielding customer benefits such as on-time spare parts delivery. The companies are emphasising safety and diversity and they have successfully worked together to recruit more women as equipment operators and service technicians.”

The Inspired by Innovation Award, meanwhile, recognises Epiroc’s most innovative technical development that has had a proven commercial success.

It has been presented, this year, to Tyler Berens, Tim Ledbetter and Dustin Penn at Epiroc’s Drilling Solutions division, Lars Eriksson at the Rocktec division, and to Adrian Boeing at the Customer Center in Australia for developing and deploying autonomous Pit Viper drill rigs for BHP.

A fleet of Pit Vipers is operating remotely at iron ore mines in the Pilbara region, some 1,300 km away from the office building in Perth, Western Australia, where BHP’s operators are located.

“This automation solution brings strong customer benefits, including improved work environment, higher productivity and lower operating costs,” Epiroc said.

Back in December, the first autonomous Epiroc Pit Viper 271 drill rig broke ground at BHP’s South Flank iron ore project in Western Australia. This was the first of five autonomous drill rigs to operate at the mine, all of which will be controlled remotely.

Per Lindberg, Epiroc’s President and CEO, said of the awards: “We are proud of our strong teams that continuously focus on making customers more productive and safe while lowering their operating costs. Automation and proactive customer collaboration are two important ways to achieve this.”

The awards will be presented to the winners at the company’s Annual General Meeting on May 9.

Agnico Eagle’s Kittilä readies for Epiroc second-gen battery-electric machines

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One of Epiroc’s second-generation battery-electric drill rigs is set to arrive at Agnico Eagle’s Kittilä gold mine in Finland in a matter of weeks, attendees at The Electric Mine conference in Toronto, Canada, heard on Friday.

According to Morgan Rody, Senior Project Manager: Sustainable Intelligent Mining Systems (SIMS), Global Strategic Projects and Alliances, Epiroc, the mine is due to receive the rig as part of the EU-backed SIMS research initiative.

SIMS is a three-year Horizon 2020-funded European-wide project aimed at demonstrating that the European mining industry and technology providers are global leaders with such sustainable and intelligent mining systems. Horizon 2020, meanwhile, is the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme ever.

The Epiroc battery-electric drill rig is scheduled to be followed over the next few months by the arrival of a second-generation Epiroc MT42 haul truck and a second generation LHD, he added.

Epiroc officially launched the second generation of its battery-electric vehicles at an event in Örebro, Sweden, last year. This came after its first-generation machines had clocked up over 60,000 hours of operations.

 

Andrew Schinkel on Kirkland Lake Gold’s battery-electric journey at Macassa

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Kirkland Lake Gold is now carrying out more than 80% of its ore production from the Macassa gold mine in Ontario, Canada, with battery-electric machines, Andrew Schinkel, Senior Electrical Engineer, Macassa Mine Complex, told attendees at The Electric Mine conference in Toronto on Thursday.

The company placed its first battery-electric machine order in 2011, but now has 24 battery-powered LHDs and nine haul trucks (including four 40 t Artisan Vehicles Z40 machines, and Epiroc and RDH Scharf LHDs, among other machines), Schinkel said in a presentation titled, Powering up Macassa: operating a major battery-electric fleet at a deep underground mine.

The company’s learnings over the past eight years have been vast, but the main points Schinkel highlighted were trucks had slightly more availability than loaders, batteries can run down power quickly, the capital cost can be slightly higher than the diesel equivalent – but “it’s not about minimising costs, it’s about maximising value”, he said – and there is not as much equipment to choose from when compared with diesel machines.

Still, the company has made significant progress with these machines, he said. This includes increased reliability of machines, an increasing amount of purchasing options and improvements in the battery change-out process.

Black Rock manganese mine chases efficiency gains with Epiroc’s Mobilaris solution

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Epiroc says its Mobilaris Mining Intelligence (MMI) is set to help improve decision making at Assmang’s Black Rock underground manganese mine in South Africa.

The mining original equipment manufacturer said this will be the first installation of the decision support solution in a room and pillar mine.

Pierre Becker, General Manager Black Rock mine, said MMI will help to increase production and utilisation at the mine. “The solution enables an unprecedented opportunity for mining personnel to make right decisions faster than ever before,” he said.

Through MMI, the Black Rock Mine control room will evolve to a source of real-time production data fully integrated with planning, task dispatch, machine telemetry data, mobile operator clients and a layer of analytics to collect and monitor insights and key performance indicators for the mine production, Epiroc said. “The project is expected to yield significant improvements in employee safety, process efficiency and overall production,” the company added.

MMI enables superior situational awareness and is designed to visualise and support mining operation in all its complexity, in real-time, according to Epiroc. It provides a 3D real-time information model where the position of machines, vehicles and personnel are recognised, and other vital information sources like shift planning, machine and production data are presented.

Andrew Main, Regional Business Line Manager, Underground Rock Excavation division for Southern Africa, Epiroc South Africa, said: “Epiroc will support Black Rock’s business improvement processes with the MMI solution. The globally acclaimed Situational Awareness together with Short Interval Control package will take their operations to the next level of performance gains.”

System installation is expected in June, Epiroc said.

LKAB plans for live SUM project testing at Konsuln in 2020

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LKAB, one of five companies invested in the Sustainable Underground Mining project (SUM), says it is hoping to move into test mode in 2020 with a number of projects aimed at making future mines carbon dioxide-free, digitalised and autonomous.

SUM has four sub-projects that are closely interconnected. In one of the sub-projects, autonomous, smart and carbon-free vehicles will be tested in LKAB’s test mine, Konsuln, in Kiruna. This will see humans and machines work together safely, according to the company.

The Swedish miner, which is looking to set a new world standard for sustainable mining at great depths, will be helped by ABB, Epiroc, Combitech and the Volvo group in its efforts.

LKAB said: “The strength of a major partnership such as SUM is that each company can contribute with its unique expertise. Epiroc has extensive experience of machinery developed for use underground and the Volvo group of vehicles used above ground. Combitech contributes with knowledge of how different systems can be integrated with each other and ABB with management systems, ie how the communication can work.”

In sub-project 2, DP2, the focus is currently on knowledge sharing and finding a common level to start with, LKAB said. The goal is to test electrically-driven, both manual and self-steering loaders, drilling rigs and forklifts that will interact with each other, people and other vehicles operating in the mine.

Hans Engberg (pictured), LKAB’s Project Manager for DP2, said: “There are several challenges, but one of the biggest is to find smart, simple and above all safe systems for underground transport in mixed traffic. We know that autonomous machines must work together with driver-controlled vehicles in the mine. Many people think that the technology already exists, but it does not. We will be the first with this.”

Mariana Forsberg, Project Manager for the Volvo group, said the company started with a survey of LKAB’s mining operations. “Volvo needs to know what vehicles are in the mine, how and where people will move and how everything works together. From that, we will then look at what autonomous solutions can work in the rather special environment that is, after all, an underground mine.”

With autonomous machines, loading operations can be carried out done for longer periods of time without breaks, which among other things would help LKAB reach its goal of increased productivity.

LKAB is also striving for a carbon-free operation, and this is where electric vehicles with batteries are deemed to be an option in the mine. How and where batteries should be charged in a production environment is one of the many questions that sub-project 2 should provide answers to.

Niklas Fors, Epiroc’s Project Manager, said: “Based on the overall objectives of the project, we will set milestones so that we can perform real test situations in Konsuln. It is a case of making use of the knowledge that exists in our various companies in SUM and bringing some fresh thinking together, with safety as a guiding light. SUM is bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Another important issue is finding answers to how data should be communicated, so that the right information reaches the right recipients at the right time.

“For a safe and accessible working environment, vehicles should also be smart, ie able to exchange information by being connected in real time,” LKAB said. “This requires precise positioning of machines and people. How the data is to be collected and reach the right person or vehicle must be tested and evaluated.”

The ambition is that live testing will begin in the test mine in about a year. All test results should then be used as a basis for LKAB in the mid-2020s to decide how mining should look after the year 2030, when the current main levels in the mines in Malmberget and Kiruna are deemed to be mined out.

Engberg said: “Autonomous and smart machines are absolutely part of the solution to become carbon-free and increase productivity, but we will always need people in the mine. However, today’s miners will not do the same things as tomorrow’s. New technology brings new tasks, just as it always has in all development, whether it be in the mining industry or in society at large. What we are facing requires knowledge, fresh thinking and hard work. SUM is about our future.”

APCOM 2019 to showcase mining’s digital transformation developments

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The preliminary technical programme for the APCOM 2019 conference in Wroclaw, Poland, (June 4-6) has gone live, showing off some of the highest quality peer-reviewed papers on ‘digital transformation’ in mining, from resource estimation to mine operation and safety.

The conference topics include:

Geostatistics and resource estimation

APCOM said: “An entire three-day conference stream provides more than 20 leading- edge and peer-reviewed papers by world-class practitioners from leading mining companies and by world-leading research institutes.”

Papers on this topic include: Transforming Exploration Data Through Machine Learning from MICROMINE’s Mark Gabbitus, Rock mass characterisation using MWD data and photogrammetry from Luleå University of Technology’s Sohail Manzoor, and Rethinking Fleet & Personnel Management in the era of IoT, Big Data, Gamification, and low-cost Tablet Technology from MST Global’s Sean Dessureault.

Mine planning

There will be about 15 papers on newest IT-supported techniques in mine planning, uncertainty reduction, geomechanics, modelling, simulation and the most recent software technology, according to APCOM.

Papers on this topic include: A procedure to generate optimised ramp designs using mathematical programming from Delphos Mine Planning Lab, AMTC/DIMIN, Universidad de Chile’s Nelson Morales, Incorporation of geological risk into underground mine planning from NEXA Resources’ Rafael Rosado and a presentation from AngloGold Ashanti’s Andrade Barbosa titled, Economic Optimisation of Rib Pillars Placement in Underground Mines.

Scheduling and dispatch

“Around 15 papers address long- and short-term scheduling optimisation, the application of neural networks and genetic algorithms as well as risk mitigation and related software systems. A keynote talk covers the impact of Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data and gamification on fleet scheduling topics,” APCOM said.

The conference has attracted speakers on this subject from Clausthal University of Technology, AngloGold Ashanti, University of Alberta, AusGEMCO Pty Ltd, Newmont Mining Corp, Advanced Mining Technology Center and Maptek.

Mine operation in digital transformation

There are more than 20 papers in this stream covering mining equipment related topics in the area of LHD transport, drilling and longwall operation, as well as underground communications and new digital technologies in mine safety, as well as product quality optimisation.

Speakers from the Kola Science Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Breakline and breakdown surfaces modelling in the design of large-scale blasts), Komatsu Mining (The Digital Mine eco-system), Tunnel Radio (Hybrid 5G Fibre Optic/Leaky Feeder Communication System) and Epiroc (Monitoring of a stoping operation, digital transformation in practice) are set to present papers

Emerging technologies and robotics in mining

Under this topic, there are a number of sessions with almost 10 papers covering the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in mining, the benefits of upcoming technology in robotics, mechatronics and communications, as well as the changes in machine design through digital transformation, APCOM said. Also a completely new transport system is presented in this stream.

Papers in this stream include: More Safety in Underground Mining with IoT and Autonomous Robots (TU Bergakademie Freiberg, Institute of Mining and Special Civil Engineering), Application of UAV imaging and photogrammetry for high-resolution modelling of open pit geometry and slope stability monitoring (Department of Mining and Metallurgical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno) and The concept of walking robot for mining industry (Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology).

Synergies from other industries

A plenary speech from an active airline captain will lead this session, talking about the impact of human-machine interfaces on decision-making of automated equipment and in control centres, APCOM said. Other papers will be on the transferability of building information modelling from commercial construction to mining.

A paper from MT-Silesia Sp zoo called: From machine construction to mechatronic system design: Digital Transformation is changing the way of thinking! is included. There are also talks from MobileTronics GmbH’s George Biro on, Rethinking mining transport: Trackless trains for mass transport in mining and KGHM Polska Miedeź’s Mariusz Sangórski presenting, Energy Management System Maturity Model – Systematic Approach to Gain Knowledge about Organization’s Real Engagement in Energy Efficiency Area.

The conference takes place at the convention centre of the Wroclaw University of Technology and is accompanied by an exhibition, APCOM said. A social programme, conference dinner with entertainment and partner activities are available as well as field trips on June 7.

“A post-conference hike in the Karkonosze Mountains is offered from June 8-10, with overnight stays in two microbreweries on the ridge, is a relaxing finish to the technical discussions of the week,” APCOM said.

All presentations are to be held in English. Simultaneous translation to Polish is provided if requested by a sufficient number of participants.

International Mining is a media partner for APCOM 2019.

Goldcorp’s Peñasquito mine seeing benefits of fully-autonomous drilling

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Goldcorp says it is seeing the multiple benefits of autonomous drilling at its Peñasquito gold mine in Mexico, with the company set to ramp up the use of this technology in the next few years.

In a site visit presentation, the company said using a fully-autonomous drill solution – where the drill is given instructions that it carries out automatically supervised by an operator in a safe and climate-controlled area – has been beneficial to the amount of metres drilled, the quality of drill holes and safety.

In 2017, Peñasquito pursued the use of automation by fitting two drill rigs with autonomous technology for a trial as it looked to reduce its workforce’s exposure to potential hazards associated with drilling in the open pit.

The company now has multiple rigs installed with this technology. In 2018, it retrofitted two Epiroc Pit Viper PV-351 rigs with autonomous features and it is set to retrofit another two this year, according to the site visit presentation. In 2019, it also intends to bring in two automation-ready Pit Viper PV-271s (pictured), and has another scheduled for delivery in 2020.

These are supervised in a control room where up to 12 rigs can be monitored.

The company’s current drilling fleet includes nine Pit Viper PV-351s, one Pit Viper PV-271 and four Flexiroc D65s, according to the presentation.

On the technology itself, Goldcorp said: “The drill can now operate through blasting and other interruptions, providing opportunities for additional drilling hours.”

In addition to this, the autonomous drills can achieve a consistent higher penetration rate, while improving metres per operating hour and reducing operating costs.

Goldcorp said operating hours per calendar day per drill had increased 25% since the introduction of fully-autonomous drilling, while the metres drilled per operating hour had risen 12%. This has amounted to a 40% productivity gain in metres per day, plus improved fragmentation, it added.

Just this week at an SME Annual Conference & Expo press briefing, Matthew Inge, Business Line Manager, Drilling Solutions for Epiroc, said companies were also achieving significant maintenance benefits from the use of autonomous drilling solutions.

Maintenance savings add to autonomous drilling business case, Epiroc says

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The application of autonomous drilling solutions at mine sites is resulting in more than just productivity improvements, Matthew Inge, Business Line Manager, Drilling Solutions for Epiroc, said at an SME Annual Conference & Expo press briefing this week.

Inge said the customer feedback the mining OEM had received from the 30 or so automated rigs it had at mine sites, which had drilled close to 7.5 million metres autonomously, had included significant cost savings on maintenance.

“When you talk to most customers, operators and mines they will tell you that autonomous drilling is a productivity resource,” Inge said. “One of the by-products we have seen is reduced cost of maintenance.”

He said some of the company’s biggest customers had estimated “some very large figures” for maintenance cost savings linked to, for example, reduced operator abuse of the rig and improved drill string component life.

Such savings were lowering the total cost of ownership that came with operating these machines, while also strengthening the business case for further automation on mine sites.

During the same press briefing, Epiroc announced its automation-ready Epiroc Pit Viper PV-231 would be available from Spring of this year following an 18-month field test at a Nevada gold mine. Inge said this test was probably one of the most successful trials the surface drilling team had ever experienced.