Modern Mining

productivity

Charles Ntsele, Metso’s Africa Market Area, GM Mining Sales.

Philipp Nellessen, CEO thyssenkrupp Industrial Solutions – sub-Sahara Africa.

productivity increase questions is the lack of reliable data or data at all. He rea- sons that the first step of digitalisation is therefore to make the processes/problem visible, either by equipping machines with sensors or using digital technology like drones. “Thereafter, digitalisation offers a vast amount of opportunities from simulations up to expert based pattern recognition to optimise the process, avoid unwanted

Zulfikar Umar, Remote Diagnostic Centre Manager at SKF South Africa.

Lourens Zeelie, online condition monitoring specialist at SKF Group.

operating conditions and optimise resource utili- sation. The breakthrough is thereby the on-time visibility. Today miners can get operating stages in seconds, which in the past were only reported in daily diaries. They can, for example, take one of our TK drones, quickly fly over a stockpile and know exactly how much is on that stockpile. This enables miners to react a lot faster,” says Nellessen. The same view is shared by Zulfikar Umar, Remote Diagnostic Centre Manager at SKF South Africa, who says one of the challenges in the industry today is gathering information from different sources in the plant and extracting meaningful data that can be viewed and displayed in a manner which makes sense to various stakeholders who might have very different roles and functions within the business. “Digitalisation enables different data streams which would have traditionally been compartmen- talised, to be collated and analysed from a macro perspective or smarter decisions, quicker reaction times and better planning of operations,” says Umar. Lourens Zeelie, online condition monitoring spe- cialist at SKF Group, tells Capital Equipment News

that full digitalisation enables more precise control and monitoring. Data cannot only be collected and stored anymore, it can be sorted and displayed on dashboards in a way that is easily understandable and relevant to the specific person. “A manager is only interested in a certain aspect such as throughput and profit. An operator on the other hand needs to control the plant and therefore need more detailed information such as tempera- tures, pressures and flow rates. Digitalisation makes data more accessible and optimisation easier through complex computer models,” says Zeelie. Conservative industry? Mining has traditionally been slow to adopt new technologies due to the scale and complexity of its operations. Nellessen agrees, saying that mining is a rather conservative industry, but the status quo is changing, with technologies that have great influ- ence on plant availability, cost reduction, process reliability and transparency, like digitalisation, being the main trends in the industry. “The advantage is that the implementation costs

February 2020  MODERN MINING  27