Monitoring the amount, status, and behavior of water present in and surrounding any surface or underground mine in Canada is a vital part of overall mine safety management.

Sudden increases in the volume, depth, or pressure exerted by a body of water (especially in surface/open-pit mines), or a change in the behavior of water contained within rock masses or soil deposits (underground mines) can warn of a potentially dangerous situation developing.

Water Monitoring is Vital

To stay on top of any developing situations, be able to make appropriate decisions, and implement preventative and corrective measures as required, mine engineers need to be able to quantify the problem by having easy access to regularly updated and accurate data.

One of the most widely-used and effective ways of gathering information about water within mines is by making use of piezometers, with vibrating wire piezometers being a common choice.

However, data gathered by the electronic sensors that form part of these instruments is not all that useful until it reaches the engineers who need to see it for monitoring and decision-making purposes.

Gathering Data

Various methods can and have been used to get data from the instruments to the engineer’s desk, e.g. one or more personnel members moving from piezometer to piezometer with a hand-held datalogger that reads and stores the information from each instrument, which is a slow and laborious process.

An alternate method is to connect all the vibrating wire piezometers to a cable-based network that moves the data to a central point. Although this is faster than using hand-held dataloggers, they require a massive amount of wiring to be present. These cable-based networks are expensive and time-consuming to install and maintain, and there is a high risk of damage due to cable-snagging, corrosion, theft, etc.

The Best Solution

By far the most efficient method is to set up a wireless vibrating-wire piezometer monitoring system that gathers data at pre-defined intervals (often simultaneously) and moves it quickly and efficiently over long distances, allowing it to be displayed on the engineer’s computer screen within a few seconds (or in some cases on a mobile device).

At MDT, we typically build these wireless vibrating-wire monitoring networks around hardware and technology from leading suppliers like Newtrax (underground mines) and Worldsensing (Loadsensing LS-G6 – surface mines).

Contact us now to find out more about our wireless vibrating-wire monitoring solutions and how they can make any mine in Canada a safer place.

Wireless Vibrating-Wire