Optimized Operations in Demanding Conditions
Improve asset reliability, energy use, and worker safety with integrated technologies
Underground mining depends on efficient coordination of mobile and fixed assets across crushing, hauling, ventilation, and dewatering systems. Smart automation and monitoring technologies provide real-time insight into equipment performance, energy use, and environmental conditions. Integrated control systems enable better decision-making, support predictive maintenance, and help ensure safe, continuous production.
Underground Mining Solutions in Action
Underground mining operations rely on dependable control and visibility to maintain safety and output. Intelligent automation and condition monitoring enable operators to track the health of mobile assets, manage complex crushing circuits, and automate power generation in hybrid microgrids. Flexible technologies help adapt to changing conditions and scale with evolving operational needs.
Improve Availability of Critical Assets
Enhance the availability and reliability of mobile equipment by continuously monitoring the health of critical assets such as shovels and reclaimers. Real-time data enables early detection of potential issues, supports proactive maintenance, and minimizes unplanned downtime—ensuring your mobile fleet operates at peak efficiency.
Maintain Throughput with Advanced Control
Maximize crushing circuit performance with integrated control systems that monitor and adjust key parameters in real time. Advanced diagnostics enable early detection of equipment wear and process inefficiencies, helping maintain consistent throughput, improve product quality, and reduce operational costs.
Crushing Circuit Control and Optimization
Reduce energy use and material variability with smart automation.
Maintain Flow and Minimize Interruptions
Enhance material handling efficiency by automating conveyor and crusher operations with real-time monitoring and control. Detect and address potential issues early to maintain consistent flow, reduce unplanned stoppages, and extend equipment lifespan—ensuring smooth and reliable throughput throughout your processing facility.
Automate Dewatering for Maximum Efficiency
Optimize mine pit dewatering with automated control systems that regulate pump operations and monitor water levels in real time. This ensures efficient water removal while maintaining safe site conditions, reducing energy consumption, and minimizing equipment wear—supporting uninterrupted mining operations.
Asset Performance Management Solutions
Extend pump life and avoid costly failures with predictive insights.
Programmable Automation Control (PAC) of Your Pumps
Coordinate pump operations with scalable control systems.
Distributed Control System (DCS) Solutions for Pump Automation and More
Enable centralized control and integration with site-wide systems.
Business Groups in Underground Mining
Each stage of underground mining—from extraction and crushing to power distribution and water management—demands specialized technologies. Our business groups provide the tools to monitor, control, and optimize complex systems under harsh conditions. Explore how integrated solutions from each group enable safe, efficient, and resilient operations underground.
Measurement instrumentation
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Get insights into common questions about underground mining operations, including safety protocols, equipment performance, and automation strategies. These answers can help address key concerns and support informed decision-making in challenging mining environments.
Mines and ore handling plants can avoid failure by using proven automation and edge technology. Better data connectivity and analysis lead immediately to improved operational uptime and asset utilization. Like many large processing industries, mining operations use many instruments, valves, pumps, and motor controls. With the right instrumentation and edge computing, all these devices can transmit valuable machine health monitoring information to a supervisory asset management system (AMS). With HART instruments, HART-enabled I/O modules, and HART-capable controllers and supervisory software, this source data flows directly to the AMS software. Users can ensure instrument calibrations are up to date, confirm instruments and valves are healthy (not plugged or wearing), and proactively identify issues so they can order replacements and plan shutdowns.
"Traditional programmable logic controllers (PLCs) have typically formed the front-line operational technology (OT) automation platform used throughout mining operations. These devices are commonly used for real-time control, but only more recently have been tapped for implementing higher level IIoT communications and analysis. This change is enabled by improved IT computing methods which are merging with OT platforms, resulting in capable edge-located IT/OT controllers. Data available at the operational edge is now easily accessible and able to be processed and transmitted, paving the way for analytics and optimization deployments.
New systems can be natively designed and built to take advantage of edge automation, and current systems can be retrofitted with edge controllers installed in parallel with existing automation to obtain the most important data from legacy hardware and newer IIoT devices.
Edge devices can be deployed in a number of mining applications to optimize crushing circuits and microgrid power optimization."
Remote monitoring or remote asset monitoring is a critical tool for mining, since mining assets are geographically dispersed. It involves the data collection from mobile mining assets that provides status and performance from a distance.
Condition monitoring is a tool that assesses machine health and integrity. It involves various measurement acquisition types and delivers the diagnostic details necessary to predict machine failure. Condition monitoring can be applied to stacker reclaimers, electric rope shovels, crushers, conveyors, and several other machine types.