Modern Mining April 2018

TECHNOLOGY

Mining industry ready to embrace

deeper mines, narrower deposits and gener- ally more difficult mining conditions, costs are steadily going up. The only way that much of the mining industry is going to survive is by increasing its efficiency through automation and other technologies.” Andrews attributes the change in attitude in part to the emergence of a new generation of mining engineers and managers, who have been brought up with smart phones and the Internet and who are entirely comfortable with new technology. Full-blown autonomous mining installa- tions around the world are still relatively rare but they do exist and have generally proved successful. An example in South Africa is the Finsch diamond mine in the Northern Cape, where a fully automated trucking loop has been operating for well over 10 years. Sandvik was the supplier of the technology, which included a fleet of six ‘driverless’ trucks. “One of the reasons there has not been a bigger uptake of automated mining technol- ogy thus far in Africa – and indeed worldwide – is that there has been a dearth of new min- ing projects over the past several years,” says Andrews. “The technology is best applied in greenfield projects. The good news is that we have a number of large new underground mines on the way across the African continent which will all use bulk mechanised mining methods and which will all probably be auto- mated to a lesser or greater degree.”

There is a growing move towards the automation of un- derground mining operations. This is the view of Simon Andrews, who is Vice President – Sales of Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology Southern Africa and also MD of the Sandvik South African Group of Companies. He says the mining industry is ever more receptive to the concept of automation and believes that a ‘tipping point’ in market acceptance is probably fast approaching.

A utomation is part of a broader trend towards the ‘digitalisa- tion’ of mining. “Within Sand- vik, we see digitalisation as a means of leveraging digital technologies to drive efficiency and profit- ability,” says Andrews. “Most of our ma- chines are now equipped to generate streams of data in real time which can then be ana- lysed to detect trends, improve performance and enhance maintenance. But digitalisation also encompasses the full or partial automa- tion of mining operations, also known as au- tonomous or semi-autonomous mining, and this is ultimately where the biggest gains are likely to be made. “We’ve noticed an incredible interest in our digitalisation and, in particular, our automa- tion technologies over the past year,” Andrews continues. “Increasingly, customers are seeing automation as being business critical. With

Below left: Digitalisation in action – an operator uses Sandvik’s iSURE ® software which optimises the drilling and blasting process. Below centre: Most of Sandvik’s machines are now equipped to generate streams of data in real time which can then be analysed to improve performance and enhance maintenance. Below right: With autono- mous operation, operators can control machines from comfortable control rooms located on surface.

32  MODERN MINING  April 2018