Aptella offers a high-tech suite of automation and positioning solutions, featuring safety-first monitoring products that provide 360° views of mine sites.
Early in his career, Andrew Jones had to inspect a cracked mine wall, a job that required him to stand directly under the hazard.
“You’re standing underneath the thing that’s cracked,” Jones, now a manager at technology company Aptella, told Safe to Work. “I knew there had to be a better way.”
Jones’ experience highlights the critical difference between risky manual measurements and safe, constant monitoring, which Aptella’s technology now makes possible, working to ensure no one has to take that same chance.
In the high-risk world of mining, the distinction between a single measurement and constant monitoring is key, according to Jones. A measurement is a single snapshot taken at a moment in time. Monitoring is a constant process, requiring sentinel-like observation that once demanded significant, and often dangerous, manual labour.
With 12 years of experience in mine rescue and emergency services, Jones has a keen appreciation for hazard management. Measurements, can still be human. Monitoring, however, is ideally suited for next-generation technology, allowing workers to tackle more complex tasks while remaining safe.
“This is about smart people doing smart things,” Jones said. “Instead of having trained, very competent people doing very manual, repetitive work, let’s automate that, and then let’s get those people doing the more cerebral kind of things where they can be better deployed.”
Aptella offers a comprehensive suite of solutions that provide a complete picture of a site’s stability. Rather than relying on a single technology, the company equips miners with a toolkit designed to detect both immediate threats and slow-moving changes over time.
Detecting the shift
One of the most popular systems Aptella distributes is from Senceive, a London-based leader in wireless condition monitoring.
While renowned for its work on global rail networks, Senceive’s technology has proven especially well-suited to the Australian mining industry.
Users have described Senceive as “reliable, robust and repeatable”.
Senceive’s wireless, low-powered and long-range systems are a ‘plug-and-play’ solution that often only require socket set. A common tool, the popular triaxial tilt sensor, can make very small measurements on movement and transmit that data in near real-time.
If any values are measured outside a specified threshold, a range of alerts can be triggered, which can transmit notifications as serious as evacuating an open cut or ceasing work in an area. Jones recalls a mine site where this technology proved critical.
“One of their tailing dams was reaching a high level of internal pressure – a leading indicator of a potential failure,” Jones said. “The Senceive system was showing that the water pressure inside the dam wall was at a hazardous level.”
Thanks to the early warning, the team deployed more sensors and used remote bulldozers to reinforce the dam wall. Increasing data reports to every two minutes helped prevent a potential disaster and eliminated downtime. For a large site with heavy vehicles and many workers, those kinds of delays can be debilitating.
“A family of sensors that can make very small measurements on movement and displacement, and then from a sensor which is 100 millimetres square, will transmit that information back to a central receiver,” Jones said.
Mapping the big picture
Aptella’s solutions stretch beyond Senceive, with the recent attainment of distribution rights for Basetime’s Locator One, a high-precision global navigation satellite system receiver.
Its purpose is to make monitoring large-scale ground movement accessible and easy to analyse.
“Where Basetime becomes really useful is when you need to monitor subsidence,” Jones said.
“For example, after the tailings dam has been built on a mine site, one of the parameters engineers are most interested in understanding is how the walls are settling under their own weight.”
With fully visualised graphics, diagrams and spreadsheets available through its Parvamoti software, the Locator One is an all-in-one product that focuses on a gradual, singular task.
The two systems are highly complementary. Senceive excels at detecting the sudden, tiny flinch of a dam wall under stress, providing an immediate warning. Basetime, on the other hand, tracks the slow, inevitable sigh of the ground settling over months or years.
One is for the acute threat, the other is for the chronic condition.
Whether it’s the high-precision tilt-sensing of Senceive or the 3D spatial awareness of Basetime, the goal remains the same.
The days of sending an employee to stand under a cracked wall are over. Aptella’s technology is creating a mining environment where safety and efficiency are built into the environment.
“I’d also like to think that at Aptella we’re known for our experience in mining in general,” Jones said. “We have a very good understanding of the underlying business operation of the mine site.”
This feature appeared in the November-December edition of Safe to Work.