Mark Roberts and Rahul Suhane, Maptek, outline how digitalisation is the key to unlocking the value of drill and blast, and how all sources of data can be tracked upstream and downstream and integrated into a single source of truth.
M
ines operate around productivity, performance, and profit. Safety and certainty are key drivers for continuous improvement. The need to accurately track and reconcile operational performance across the mining value chain is driving a revolution within the industry, as awareness grows that success hinges on an understanding of the impact of various factors at specific stages of resource recovery. Drill and blast is an important value driver for mining operations, representing approximately 20% of the cost per tonne, but it is not an exact science. Rather, it is mostly an empirical exercise, where operations learn from previous experience and each site develops its own understanding of how its geology behaves and reacts to explosives. Digital systems are important in providing the necessary feedback loop for continuous improvement – helping operations to carry out drill and blast activities smarter and safer. Maptek has found that, on top of refining day-to-day drill and blast, digital systems such as Maptek BlastLogic are improving associated processes and opening doors for innovation in the field.
Why digital? Many existing methods are a one-way street. Digital systems make them two-way, providing the feedback loop needed to improve outcomes. This improvement can come
about manually, where engineers look into past data and make adjustments, or it can arise from applying predictive analysis with new machine learning paradigms, which look into past data and outline what is likely to happen in the future. Digitalisation also provides near-live information on the bench to drive compliance to plan. Without the data feedback loop there is nothing to learn. An operation can still run but there is unlikely to be ongoing improvement, and latent value that could have been unlocked gets lost in the dirt. Losing as little as US$1/t makes a huge impact when considering mines that ship millions of tonnes per year – US$1/t saved, or extracted, obviously means millions of dollars on the bottom line. Digitalisation facilitates better integration between drill and blast and upstream information, such as resource models and mine plans, and boosts reconciliation of downstream processes, such as: dig rates, crusher throughputs, and vibration events. Recording information on sheets of paper, which get filed never to see the light of day again, is rightly becoming a thing of the past, as digitalisation brings greater insight, transparency, and accountability. Taking into account all of these considerations, it makes sense to acknowledge that data is king, with connected digital systems providing a single source of truth to work from.
global mining review // September 2021
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