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We have radar for the sky, sonar for the water, aerial photography for surface images, yet what do we have that lets us see into the ground? Imagine knowing precisely where to drill for the exact material you’re looking for amid hundreds of square miles of untapped resources under your feet.
If mining equipment owners and operators could essentially see into the ground and know exactly how dense the material was 400 or even 900 feet below the surface, they would know what drill bits to have on hand and when to switch them out without worrying about damaging the machine.
With the down economy and new equipment sales falling across the board, many OEMs are focusing on remanufacturing and repairing older equipment to keep customers coming back. MicroMentis’ platform allows OEMs to sell a machine equipped with a technology that can ensure safe, accurate and efficient digging, drilling and excavating boosting owner/operator confidence in the machine, and ultimately saving time, money and protecting the land from unnecessary damage.
It began as merely a vision of Daniel Rioux, president of MicroMentis Inc., Laval, Quebec, Canada, chief technical officer (CTO) and inventor of the MicroMentis technology platform, SWIPS (Surface Wave Intelligent Profiling System). In 1983 he was working for a company to identify why vibrations from a train were causing waves related to structural damage of buildings. “Working with the propagation of those waves, I equated it to surface waves in the ground and studied, at the time, the possibility of looking into the ground,” Rioux says. “I thought it would be a good technology to look into, but was limited to the geotechnical theory and faced some very challenging issues.”
In 2001 he met someone doing his PhD on the propagation of surface waves into solid media who immediately solved all of Rioux’s issues. From that moment on, the idea to look into the ground was patented, the hardware design was developed and patented, and the decision to build the new technology was made. “We went into the civil engineering field collecting and reinforcing data and published a scientific paper on the technology. Through that we were able to get proof of concept… so it became a question of supplying a hardware platform that was suitable for our customer’s applications,” Rioux says.
Gathering information
SWIPS integrates information from sources such as aerial photography, geospatial and engineering data and will visualize, analyze and model the physical and mechanical properties of solids fast and precisely in a non-intrusive manner.
“The first step is to acquire as much information that you already have on file, such as aerial photography, topographic maps, gravity anomalies or airborne survey such as magnetic. You can imbed that information into the MicroMentis SWIPS platform,” says Rioux. “Once you’ve combined the [spatial information] together, you can evaluate the substrate of the underground… The information only has to be in regards to georeference with standard units of measurement.”
Since the equipment used on site is bound by the ground material’s properties, such as density and location, the more information one has ahead of time allows for a more informed choice of the exact equipment needed to extract the specific materials. This sort of efficiency means less wasted time, fuel and money transporting unneeded equipment, fewer wasted resources and a safer environment for the equipment.
If it is a dense material, the site manager will know to use high quality steel parts during extraction, as well as the appropriate time to switch a drill head and how much torque to apply to avoid part damage. If the density were to go unknown, the equipment could be ruined; and if the operator chooses to proceed with extreme caution to prevent equipment damage, the performance of the equipment and efficiency can be sacrificed due to being over cautious.
Once the information is gathered and a strategy is formed and evaluated, it’s time to conduct the measurements using the SWIPS hardware: 16 Wireless Sensors, the User Interface and the Impact Generator. All components are self-installing, self-healing, self-communicating and self-calibrating — meaning they automatically find the correct operational setting.
