In the article ‘Breaking Out of Silos’ by Paul Moore, International Mining explores the challenges the mining industry is facing in managing increasing volumes of data.
In the face of lower ore grades, deeper resources in ever more remote locations, Paul Moore says that digitalisation is being used to increase cost efficiency and enable the automation of operations and processes across the mining industry. Digitalisation is capable of driving integration of suppliers and partners along the value chain. Furthermore, these tools are being integrated at all mining stages, from exploration, engineering and simulation to advanced process control.
The article highlights that CEEC sponsor Weir Minerals is using big data to optimise the configuration and design of its products and services. The company has developed its own Internet of Things (IoT) platform, Synertrex® in response to customer needs.
“Building on our customers’ core requirements, we have redefined the performance, reliability and safety of our products and services in our core mining applications through developing a range of IoT enabled equipment and services,” Ben Baker, Weir’s Synertrex® Technology Director said.
Moore also showcases the enhancements that Schneider Electric, a leader in digital transformation of energy management and automation, has made to its manufacturing operations management solution. According to Schneider Electric, it offering mining organisations an opportunity to digitally transform their operations with highly accurate, real-time visibility to information across production, inventory and quality management processes.
“Miners can now automatically log all inputs and outputs of the plant in real-time, including materials, consumables, energy, waste and emissions output. This data, when made available to domain-specific decision support tools and integrated with supply chain and enterprise resource planning systems, unlocks new levels of intelligence to drive continuous improvement. Eliminating manually entered production values while breaking down pervasive operational data silos can minimise time, errors and costs associated with manual and duplicate data-entry, further enhancing agility and efficiency,” Schneider Electric said.
Intelligence maintenance, cloud computer and big data, data management and productivity, performance monitoring and management are also covered in the article. Go to www.im-mining.com and search the November issue to read the full article.
Meanwhile, other CEEC sponsors are also making advances in this space. PETRA Data Science, for example, is helping mining operations use big data to optimise their performance. In announcing the sponsorship of CEEC last year, PETRA Data Science Principal and Managing Director Penny Stewart said her company had been established to link mining professionals and data scientists to realise the value of the zettabytes of mining data which was being collected each year.
Stewart said the strong engineering background of her team was a key to PETRA Data Science’s success.
“We now have a team of nine supporting many mining companies to harness the power of big data in machine learning and optimisation. We use our engineering knowledge to derive engineering parameters from the raw data. Engineered data signals are typically 10% to 15% more reliable at detecting events than raw data signals. This brings real benefits in energy and productivity in mining,” she said.