Smart Mining with IIoT

Globally, many mining companies are evaluating connected mining on their Industrial IoT journey,
writes Pooja Patil.

Industrial Internet of Things (Industrial IoT) is expanding rapidly across the globe creating interconnected intelligent solutions and equipment. Like many other industries, mining is also experiencing these technological shake up in recent years. Emerging technologies are helping to upgrade the mining operations. By adding more automation, sensors and connectivity to equipment, mining domain is largely benefiting in terms of enhanced productivity, safety, improved efficiency and asset utilization. Although the use of technology has positive impact on business, the adoption is not smooth creating many challenges with equipment OEMs always looking at ways to overcome barriers in order to stay competitive. Globally, many mining companies are evaluating connected mining on their Industrial IoT journey. Today, Indian mining OEMs too are evaluating challenges, benefits, and have started evaluating technologies. They have understood that early movers will gain huge competitive and sustainable advantages over slow movers.            

Challenges

New technologies bring in new unexplored challenges and similar is the case with Industrial IoT. Based on the industry, geography the challenges could be diverse. Mining OEMs too face plenty of challenges slowing down technology adoptions. Non-clarity about investments and RoIs, data security, poor network coverage, lack of standardizations etc. are a few challenges, which are not unique to India. Apart from these, Industrial IoT in mining is facing some other challenges, which are elaborated below with the possible solutions to alleviate them.

Predictive Maintenance

Equipment maintenance is one of the important aspects for mining OEMs as it consumes major budget. Maintenance is not only important for smooth equipment operation but also for the operational safety. Every mining site generally follows a unique maintenance schedule to ensure that equipment is working as desired and capable of efficiently working throughout the day. However, the equipment undergoes immense stress often creating situations of unforeseen break down. When such unplanned failure occurs, depending on the severity of the fault and complexity of the asset, it reduces productivity or even brings it to a standstill. Mining sites are often located in most remote locations with extreme weather conditions, least accessibility and communication difficulties. In such conditions, it is clear that maintenance requires more proactive approach than normal routine maintenance. In addition, the cost involved in maintaining equipment is very high, and the time needed to service them on the field is large. The remote locations also make reporting of errors and breakdown difficult as some places do not even have network connectivity.

Predictive Maintenance

Predictive maintenance is one such solutions mining sectors is looking at to improve productivity and reduce unplanned downtimes, as it provides an ability to anticipate failures before they bring the entire equipment to a standstill. It helps to maximize availability using data acquired through condition monitoring by constantly monitoring equipment health and recognizing problems early and prevent unplanned downtime.  B&R’s X90 module allows mining OEMs to continuously monitor the status of mobile equipment. The results help determine exactly which components require maintenance and when. Its typical applications include continuous monitoring of rotating machine components such as hydraulic assemblies, belts, bearings, gears, motors and other mechanics. The processed sensor data is also available for further use in the application. The modular X90 control and I/O system are equipped with condition monitoring functions so that the problems or faults can be detected in their early stages and can be corrected before they result in unplanned downtime. Condition-based predictive maintenance maximizes equipment availability, save considerable cost of outages and unplanned service calls. Most mines are environmentally challenging to work in. Dust, moisture, water run-off, and outdoor exposure to sunlight, wind and rain might affect the smooth working of equipment. However, all products in the X90 mobile family are designed for use in such harsh industrial environments. They can handle operating temperatures from -40 to +85°C and are resistant to vibration, shock, salt, UV light and oil.

Remote Maintenance

Mines are spread over a large area and often in remote locations. As discussed earlier, operation and maintenance is critical aspect. Advanced technology solutions such as remote monitoring and maintenance are helping reduce operational costs faced by mining operators. The remote maintenance solution from B&R makes diagnosis and maintenance of equipment easier than ever. The solution utilizes the latest IT and security standards and allows for significant savings with low investment costs. Equipment downtime results in losses and in such cases every minute counts. If a service technician is not available on-site, it takes hours or days before expert assistance is available. With the B&R remote maintenance solution, a technician can connect, run diagnostics, adjust parameters and resolve the error – all in a matter of moments. With B&R’s remote maintenance solution, a service technician can access machines from anywhere in the world to retrieve logbook entries, application data and much more. Moreover, the remote maintenance solutions can be used to log field data from the equipment, which can be used to prepare trends providing a graphical representation of the situation on-site. This solution uses queuing protocols such as MQTT, OPC UA or AMQP, which make it possible for storing data on the controller and send to the cloud when the network is available. Coupling predictive maintenance with remote maintenance helps OEMs to access equipment from their offices and get complete details about its operations.

Data Safety and Security

With increased use of Industrial IoT in mining it is expected to generate huge volumes of data. Analyzing this data will provide useful information by identifying inadequacies and waste in existing operations. Advanced data analytics gives insights on past actions and help mining companies to predict future occurrences. Today, managing safety and security of this data are new challenges, which are comfortably resolved by using open source networking protocols such as MQTT, OPC UA or AMQP. For safe and secure data transfer between field and cloud, B&R relies on these vendor-independent communication protocols.

OPC UA is an open source communication protocol widely used in industrial automation applications as well as has made its way into off-highway equipment. It is based on the client-server principle and allows seamless vertical and horizontal connectivity. The protocol is platform-independent and features built-in safety mechanisms. Since OPC UA is flexible and completely independent, it is regarded as an ideal communication protocol for vertical and horizontal connectivity. B&Rs support for such open technologies helps in reducing the total cost of ownership and provides a common platform for networking due to the vendor independent nature of these protocols.

In addition, B&R provides robust, real-time communication on field level and in-equipment connectivity based on open source platforms. CAN in Automation (CiA) and Ethernet POWERLINK Standardization Group (EPSG) are the non-profit organizations driving the open source technologies CANopen and Ethernet POWERLINK, which are widely used and accepted globally in off-highway equipment for field to controller communications. For equipment-to-equipment and equipment-to-cloud communication, B&R trusts in OPC UA, MQTT and AMQP for secure and safe connectivity to cloud. The vendor neutral approach has helped various vendors adopt such technologies in their controllers, actuators, cameras and other peripheral devices at negligible investment. This helps OEMs to connect various devices on a single network, enhancing diagnostics, reducing maintenance and providing seamless connectivity to the cloud. Even cloud platforms have already adopted such open source communication for interfacing with the field devices. OPC UA, Ethernet POWERLINK and MQTT all being open source and Ethernet based provide the necessary bandwidth for such complex and demanding applications.

Smart Mining

Industrial IoT eliminates the most intensive challenges of the mining industry by providing real time visibility of equipment allowing quick problem solving or preventing it altogether. Industrial IoT helps improve operational and functional safety and equipment health. With cutting-edge technology solutions together with open source communication standards, B&R is the right partner for implementing industrial IoT for increased sustainability, flexibility, higher productivity and profitability.

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