Process Monitoring in Heavy Duty Drilling Rigs—Data Acquisition System and Cycle Identification Algorithms

Abstract

The monitoring of drilling processes is a well-known topic in the mining industry. It is widely used for rock mass characterization, bit wear monitoring and drilling process assessment. However on-board monitoring systems used for this purpose are installed only on a limited number of machines, and breakdowns are possible. There is a need for a data acquisition system that can be used on different drilling rigs and for an automatic data analysis procedure. In this paper, we focused on the automatic detection of drilling cycles, presenting a simple yet reliable system to be universally installed on drilling rigs. The proposed solution covers hardware and software. It is based on the measurement of electric current and acoustic signals. The signal processing methods include threshold-based segmentation, a short-time envelope spectrum and a spectrum for the representation of results. The results of the research have been verified on a real drilling rig within the testing site of its manufacturer by comparing the results with the data of the on-board monitoring system installed on the machine. Novel aspects of our approach include the detection of the pre-boring stage, which has an intermediate amplitude that masks the real drilling cycles, and the use of the percussion instantaneous frequency, which is estimated by acoustic recordings.

The analysis of the currently used systems related to the monitoring of the mining production process

“…Aramis M / E seismic system. It enables detection, digital recording and buffering of seismic quakes transmitted from the bottom of the mine and their further processing (in terms of their localization and energy calculation), visualization and archiving [11,22]. Figure 1 shows an example of a plot of a seismic tremor recorded by the Aramis program.…”

The essence of thermovision research in the prevention of fires in underground workings

“…Due to their structure and the content of flammable materials, such as diesel and hydraulic oils, they must be equipped with permanent fire-extinguishing systems and additionally handheld fire-fighting equipment. [3,5,9]. Fig.…”

“…In the figure above you can see the causes of exogenous fires in copper mines. Technological problems that occurred in the indicated machines and places, described in [3] most of the fires were caused by the contact of the leaking hydraulic or diesel oil and its contact with a source of high heat. Leak detection is possible with the use of thermal imaging cameras thanks to the modes mentioned earlier.…”

“…Nowadays it is possible to observe ongoing research on combating natural hazards [7,8]. In the works on innovative technologies [3] significant conclusions were shown regarding the increase of work safety in underground mining [4,5,6,7]. Due to the high risk posed by the occurrence of fires in mining excavations it is necessary to regularly analyze the term conditions of devices which are the most common cause of fire hazard formation.…”

The effectiveness of the use of a powered roof support in the light of research and analysis

“…The concept of effectiveness is most often understood as the mutual relations between the inputs and refers to the principle of rational management. A different approach to the issues related to the powered roof support can be found in the literature [3][4][5][6]. Underground hard coal mining companies often apply the concept of technical efficiency, understood as maximising the production volume with the use of the given input [7][8].…”