MDT’s geotechnical and other instruments and solutions are very popular with underground miners due to their ruggedness, ease of use and cost-effectiveness. Did you know, though, that we also provide surface solutions?

Most open-pit mines make extensive use of vibrating wire piezometers to monitor water levels and pressure in the mine and surrounding areas. This helps to manage the risks associated with a build-up of ground water from rain or other sources, and to assess the progress of any dewatering activities being performed.

Geotechnical instruments like contractometers and extensometers may also be used to monitor rock faces and other features in and around the mine.  These monitoring sensors produce a lot of useful data that can make a significant contribution to the overall safety, efficiency, productivity and cost-effectiveness of the mine.

However, this data is only really useful if it can be easily and quickly accessed. To facilitate this, a monitoring solution is required. Wireless monitoring systems are preferable (in both surface and underground applications), as they offer a multitude of benefits over systems that require miles and miles of cabling or even manual reading of sensors.

The Loadsensing G6 long-range wireless data acquisition system from Worldsensing is the best choice when it comes to surface solutions for open-pit mines.  Some of the advantages offered by this system are:

• Able to read most commonly used geotechnical and hydrology sensors
• User-defined alarm thresholds that are periodically checked anywhere from every 30 seconds to once every 24 hours, as required by the client
• Completely wireless system that moves data from sensors via a Loadsensing gateway into the MDT cloud-hosted Vista Data Vision Software (VDV), from which it can be accessed anywhere via web and easily interpreted.

The rapid information gathering and delivery capabilities of the Loadsensing system make it the logical choice when it comes to surface solutions in open-pit mines.