Mining Breakout Sessions

Conuma Coal is a Canadian metallurgical coal producer employing more than 850 employees at three surface mining operations and associated facilities. The company's commitment to efficiencies gained by digital solutions extends across planning, operations and safety. Recently, Conuma invested in a multi-year contract to protect employees and equipment at mines in northern British Columbia. The safety package integrates systems for collision avoidance, fatigue monitoring and tracking radar with a web-based reporting and analytics enterprise platform. Cody Bartkoski explains the benefits of going digital and why spending on loss prevention is earning them long-term security.

What if we could search physical spaces as easily as we search text? What if we could hyperlink objects in the physical world as simply as we hyperlink content? Join Juergen Dold, President of Hexagon’s Geosystems division, as he shares Hexagon’s vision for digitizing Earth and all she holds in it, where all things are machine readable and subject to the power of algorithms. The realization of this potential will unleash millions of opportunities that transport us to a never-before-seen world of possibility.

Mines are busy places where noise, heavy traffic and poor visibility can often be the norm. Distraction and fatigue can also be an all-too-real hazard for light vehicle operators used to sharing the road with giant trucks driving familiar routes during long shifts. To tackle this safety issue, Hexagon now offers a real-time monitoring solution specifically tailored to light-vehicle operators. The solution, which assesses driver alertness, gauging fatigue and distraction, while reporting analysis and alerts, will be presented by Hexagon product specialists Marcos Bayuelo and Ryan Hawes.

Although budgets are tight, time demands are even tighter. Now more than ever, it is important to know as quickly as possible how a drillhole is influencing our resource. Faster turnarounds are needed to determine geological and metallurgical properties so they can be included in a model that can be used for mine planning on shorter and shorter timeframes. This situation has produced a paradigm change on where we collect drilling data and how we view its value. Previously unexplored workflow using geoscientific imagery are now considered essential because they can speed up our efforts to define geological and physical properties without the overhead of accessing the material physically. Workflows based on imagery are becoming a key component of how we do our jobs. Photographs have always been taken of diamond core and sample cuttings. However, these images to date have only been captured as insurance for the future and supporting validation and verification tasks. They are rarely considered valuable sources of immediate data. This presentation will discuss why better images must be taken while drilling, why we should view them as a valuable source of data and how they can be used to support a continuous modelling process.

Integrated with Hexagon technologies, the Miner Operated Survey System (MOSS) can be influential in how underground mines deliver digital solutions that improve productivity and quality across manufacturing, infrastructure, safety and mobility applications. MOSS from NSS Canada is an underground surveying software which supports a wide range of Leica robotic total stations, including Leica’s latest state-of-the-art MS60. MOSS integrates mine design specifications and drawings when completing mark-ups, and provides real-time information to miners, engineers and geologists. MOSS can reduce overbreak to under 10% as well as providing accurate line and grade markups for every round. Drawing upon decades of experience in the mining industry, Alistair Ross and Bruno Lalonde will explain the technology needed by mines to improve both accuracy and efficiency when it comes to following mine plans.

Collisions involving equipment concern all mining operations. Usually these incidents result in damage and downtime for repairs. However, severe incidents can involve injuries and even loss of life. The financial cost of collisions illustrates the potential return on investment of avoiding just one major incident. The cost of a serious injury or fatality is more difficult to quantify. Hexagon is working hard to help mines prevent collisions and their consequences with a range of solutions that represent the most comprehensive portfolio on the market. Join Marcos Bayuelo to learn more about the latest advances in systems for collision avoidance, personal protection, fatigue monitoring and vehicle intervention.

Few mines epitomize the profound advantages of smart change quite like Fresnillo. The world's leading silver producer and Mexico's largest gold producer, Fresnillo was looking to maximize the potential of its operations while maintaining its position as a leading low-cost supplier. It turned to Hexagon, targeting an integrated technology portfolio to address its planning, operations, enterprise and survey and monitoring needs. This presentation will discuss the benefits of engaging one solutions provider to help develop high-potential projects into low-cost, world-class mines.

Slope failure and movement has always posed one of the biggest risks in mining; making slope monitoring an integral part of safety in mines. As a unique integrated software platform, the HxGN GeoMonitoring Hub, is able to combine, analyze, visualize and cross-check all measurement results delivered by automated monitoring systems, such as Total Stations, GNSS, radar systems, geotechnical and environment sensors, InSAR, as well as manual readings in one geographic environment. Radar technology and traditional prism monitoring, although highly complementary, are brought together by HxGN GeoMonitoring Hub in a single platform.

By integrating data from two existing platform, IDS GeoRadar Guardian and the Leica GeoMoS Monitoring System, the HxGN GeoMonitoring Hub now brings the best of both worlds together in one simple to use software that provides users with a holistic understanding of open-pit mine slope stability, giving them actionable information with which they can make safer and more efficient decisions. Its intuitive and customizable interface, where charts and graphics can be created by simply dragging and dropping the required elements in a dynamic and flexible way, provides the best suited information for every project. This presentation will give insight to the HxGN GeoMonitoring Hub and how integrating two complementary technologies from IDS GeoRadar and Leica Geosystems will change the future of monitoring slope stability in mining.

Geotechnicians are frequently faced with decisions based upon a variety of data from different types of sensors. These decisions must be made in a very short period of time and must correlate the different data, from weather, to underground to surface sensors. The interpretation of these parameters may take time that is valuable to prevent major damages to machinery and injuries or fatalities to people. QSI for almost 20 years has learned and developed an integrated platform that helps professionals to make decisions in no time. These platforms take advantage of Hexagon's technology, such as TPS, Laser Scanner, GNSS, GeoMoS Software, IDS radars and other auxiliary technology. All these sensors, plus InSAR data and geotechnical sensors, generate massive amounts of data, that most of the time are not processed in real time, therefore integration and real-time processing is a must for on-time decisions. With this experience, QSI has implemented the Total Monitoring concept in several open pit mines in Peru.

An innovative radar system that locates, tracks and alerts on rockfall events in real time providing 24/7 monitoring. Small, yet powerful, this new solutions detects the smallest movements at the longest distance to provide the earliest alert. A solution which bridges the gap between early warning systems that monitor slopes before the event and volumetric instruments that can analyze the post-event state of the slope. Optimise your operations by recording and georeferencing all rockfalls, this innovative radar allows analysis to create accurate risk assessments and zone maps.