Tag Archives: fatigue management

Rajant’s BreadCrumb Peregrine unlocks tech deployment possibilities for Anglo American in South Africa

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Rajant Corporation, the pioneer of Kinetic Mesh® wireless networks, says it has successfully deployed its fourth-generation BreadCrumb® Peregrine node at an Anglo American operation in South Africa.

Peregrine, which supports a maximum combined data rate of 2.3 Gb/s and up to six times enhanced throughput performance over existing Rajant BreadCrumbs, is being used at the operation to support applications for mine production systems, including proximity detection, fatigue management and teleremote drilling.

It is the first deployment in South Africa with Anglo American.

“Rajant has always been the leader in industrial wireless mesh networking,” Reyno Eksteen, BU Head, Scan RF Projects, a Rajant Kinetic Mesh distributor, says. “With the substantial increase in performance of the new generation Peregrine BreadCrumbs, our customers now can support applications that require more bandwidth. Because all Rajant BreadCrumb models are fully backward compatible, it makes migrating to the latest higher-capacity radio nodes much easier while still redeploying the existing BreadCrumbs to other parts of the network to get the most out of the customer’s investment.”

After successful implementation, Anglo American confirmed a considerable increase in capacity of the Rajant Peregrine within its pit network, enabling the company to become more innovative by introducing technologies in areas of its operation where it was previously impossible, Rajant says. This allows the mine to scale the overall network with the operation’s demands quickly, bringing much higher bandwidth closer within areas of its pit production environment.

The new Peregrine BreadCrumb provides impressive performance with the same robust hardware, which can withstand the harsh conditions of an open-pit mine, Rajant added.

The Peregrine offers multiple MIMO radio interfaces, high throughput and enhanced security performance with up to 256-QAM and 80 MHz channels. It is part of Rajant’s initiative to develop deeply integrated solutions that securely combine data from connected people, vehicles, machines and sensors, with machine learning.

“This data combination unlocks the benefits of process optimisation, digital twins, predictive analytics, condition-based maintenance, augmented reality and virtual reality while improving worker safety,” Rajant says.

The Peregrine is interoperable with all BreadCrumb radio nodes to expand market capabilities for industries like mining, rail, shipping ports, public safety, agriculture and heavy construction. It is fortified with rugged, environmentally-sealed enclosures and supports several robust cryptographic options for data and MAC-address encryption and per-hop, per-packet authentication.

Scalable to hundreds of mobile, high-bandwidth nodes, the Peregrine enables data, voice, and video applications.

(photo credit: Anglo American)

Gold Fields installs CAS safety solution at Tarkwa gold mine

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Gold Fields is upping the safety stakes at its Tarkwa gold mine in Ghana, employing a collision avoidance system (CAS) that should reduce the number of vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-personnel interactions at the open-pit operation.

Having installed a fatigue management system back in 2012-2013 – which saw equipment interactions and accidents decrease – the company has now purchased the HxGN MineProtect Collision Avoidance System Pro as part of a “discrete, dedicated project”, a company spokesperson confirmed to IM.

Hexagon says the CAS Pro system protects all mining vehicles, assets and vehicle operators within 500 m of the installed cab-based unit in open-pit mines.

The solution provides 360° awareness for surrounding vehicles and selected assets, as well as a collision avoidance function based on path prediction, the company explained.

Using GNSS and RF technologies, the solution enjoys high operator adoption because of minimal nuisance alarms and enhanced safety for all mine and vehicle types, according to Hexagon.

The Gold Fields spokesperson said CAS Pro was being used in line with Earth Moving Equipment Safety Roundtable (EMESRT) guidelines. The solution includes operator awareness and advisory controls, the spokesperson added.

As part of the project, Gold Fields has issued 150 personal tags to employees working near operating equipment, including spotters and samplers. The operating equipment to benefit from the new solution includes 84 dump trucks, 21 excavators, 65 pieces of ancillary fleet (including loaders, dozers and service trucks) and 100 light vehicles (50 with fixed CAS units and 50 with removable units).

While the CAS solution does not include anti-braking functionality, it does have a range of other intervention procedures, according to the spokesperson.

“Stopping a plus-200 t haul truck in milliseconds in an open-pit environment may create other hazards,” the spokesperson explained.

Fatigue Science equips Goldcorp’s Peñasquito workers with Readiband

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Fatigue Science says it has been selected by Goldcorp to enable the proactive monitoring and mitigation of worker fatigue risk across the Peñasquito polymetallic mine in Mexico.

Goldcorp is deploying Fatigue Science’s predictive fatigue management solution, Readiband™, to more than 1,000 employees at Peñasquito, the global leader in fatigue and readiness management technology said.

“The initiative will enable Goldcorp to proactively monitor for fatigue and support workers who present acute or chronic fatigue and is part of Goldcorp’s broader Health & Safety vision: ‘Safe Enough for Our Families’ – a portfolio of programmes which support the safety and health of their people at work, at home and in their communities,” Fatigue Science said.

Mine employees will be equipped with Fatigue Science’s wrist-worn Readiband and its mobile software application so they can manage their personal readiness and fatigue levels in advance of and during their shift ahead, the company said. In the interest of worker safety, management will use a fatigue prediction dashboard prior to the start of each shift to proactively assess and intervene with those mine operations personnel projected to become at risk of experiencing high levels of fatigue during their upcoming shift, it added.

Andrew Morden, CEO of Fatigue Science, said: “The scale of this deployment across more than 1,000 workers validates our vision that by providing accurate, actionable and predictive fatigue data to organisations like Goldcorp, we can positively impact the well-being of workers and organisations as a whole and concurrently deliver value.”

The company said: “Effective fatigue and readiness management requires more than simply measuring the prior night’s sleep so Goldcorp has chosen to rely on the world’s best readiness and fatigue model, which was developed by the US Army Research Lab for Fatigue Science, to make sense of it all. Available only from Fatigue Science, the SAFTE™ Biomathematical Fatigue Model analyses a full spectrum of personal sleep patterns captured by the Readiband to empower workers to measure, manage, and reduce their fatigue levels.”

Victor Vdovin, Mine Operations Manager at Penasquito, Goldcorp, said: “We understand that monitoring and addressing worker readiness and fatigue has substantial economic benefits including the reduction of injuries and lost time, while increasing worker satisfaction and productivity.

“Through close collaboration with Fatigue Science, we have also obtained full support of Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores Mineros, Metalúrgicos, Siderúrgicos y Similares de la República Mexicana which represents our mine employees, in deploying the Readiband fatigue management programme. We want to ensure that every one of our people goes home safe at the end of every shift, and we’re confident that Readiband will help enable that.”