Newmont Gold is the world’s largest gold miner and as such is always looking for operational improvements to keep their mining operations at the forefront of efficiency, as well as total production. With this in mind, management at the Leeville mine in Nevada identified the opportunity to introduce a range of management tools and processes on the back of major upgrades in underground communication infrastructure.
After developing a detailed scope and selection in a tender process, Newmont choose the Mine Site Technologies (MST) digital solution, based on our ImPact wireless network suite of technologies.
The initial stage of the project has been commissioned and provides an extensive wireless network to the underground operation at Leeville and Carlin East. The underground network consists of a total of 88 wireless network devices, including:
- 48 ImPact wireless network switches (WNS) in various configurations to suit specific requirements at particular locations. Configurations include single or twin wireless radio cards, up to four fibre switches and four PoE outputs, within a single housing
- These ImPact WNS units are connected together by MST’s composite fibre/power cable, joining the mine’s network at several key locations to form a number of redundant rings
- 40 ImPact wireless access points (WAP) connected to nearby ImPact WNS units by industrial CAT5 cable, to provide hotspots extensions in key locations
The initial applications to utilise this high bandwidth network include:
- Personnel tracking, using 400 RFID tags mounted in the ICCL cap lamp
- Equipment tracking, using 65 self-contained tags for tracking vehicles
- VoIP telephony using the installed network
- Laptops are being used at underground locations by being wirelessly connected to the network
The network use is planned to be expanded with other applications over time. The first of these will be vehicle intelligence. This will use the vehicle intelligence platform (VIP) module to collect and upload in real time load and diagnostic data off a range of underground machines. This in turn will be used to streamline the management of these assets and automate the upload of information into the mine’s management software applications.
It was the ability of a well designed underground wireless network to consolidate a lot of communication and data requirements into a single backbone that was the key driver in Newmont investing in the ImPact digital system. MST feels the engineering design and ease of deployment in the mine environment is what differentiated the ImPact solution from more standard network solutions that are really only practical to use in surface office environments.
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