AUTOMATION
and this sector is far more advanced than on-road autonomous vehicles, which have legislative impediments. But the integration of drilling with other mining operations, together with extraction and transportation, depends on management systems that, in turn, depend on the appropriate software and integration of systems. A recent research report from
Future Market Insights (FMI), Smart Mining Market: Global Industry Analysis and Opportunity Assessment 2015-2020, expects smart mining to be worth US$13 billion by 2020 with a projected compound annual growth rate of 14.5% over the next fi ve years. FMI’s end-user survey revealed almost 88% of surface and underground mining companies that responded are making use of smart technology of some kind.
FMI estimates that the smart mining
market in the APEJ (Asia Pacifi c Excluding Japan) region will expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 16% through 2020.
Real-world application Rio Tinto is one company committed to the development of autonomous
34
www.engineerlive.com
mining through its ‘Mine of the Future’ programme. T e company believes that innovation and technology are critical to productivity and safety improvements that will increasingly remove people from harm as boundaries in automation are pushed, and has already seen improvements demonstrated by its trucks and drills. T e autonomous drills at the company’s West Angelas mine site have delivered an increase of around 10% over manually operated drills and an operational cost saving of 8%. West Angelas is the only fully autonomous production drill site in the world, with seven autonomous drills having drilled over 2.25 million metres. T e company says its AutoHaul
project will, when in operation, be the world’s fi rst fully autonomous long distance heavy haul railway and will further improve the effi ciency and productivity of our iron ore business. A manned train has two shift changes every, which means almost two hours loss of run time per day can be gained back day using the system. An additional benefi t will be the elimination of the
Inside Rio Tinto’s Excellence Centre in Brisbane, Australia, which is setting out to capitalise on Big Data as a means to improve productivity and enhance operational effi ciencies
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56