The Most Efficient Way to Perform Wireless Vibrating-Wire Monitoring in Your Surface Mine

As an engineer or manager of an open pit/surface mine, you no doubt spend a significant amount of time contending with water in the mine – whether it enters the mine as rain or surface water run-off, or originates as groundwater that seeps into low-lying areas of the mine, naturally or as a result of mining operations, or remains as groundwater within the rock and soil in the mine.

Of course, monitoring the level and pore pressure of open bodies of water or groundwater in your surface mine is a critical part of safety management and productivity planning. Data is a key part of this process — after all, as the maxim goes, you can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.

If your mine is like most modern mines around the globe, you will have an array of piezometers installed throughout the mine to measure water levels and pore pressure – many, if not all, of these will be of the vibrating-wire variety.

Collecting data from all the vibrating-wire monitoring piezometers can present a challenge, especially if the mine you work at is large and contains a lot of water.

Gathering data individually from vibrating-wire piezometers by means of hand-held data loggers is time-consuming and labour-intensive and reduces the usefulness of the data, as it is probably at least several hours old before you can use it.

Cable-based networks that connect all the vibrating-wire piezometers in the mine to a central monitoring point are one step better, but they are expensive and time-consuming to install, with a fair amount of maintenance required and a high risk of damage (or even cable theft in some areas).

The best, most efficient way for you to monitor the water in your mine is to connect all your piezometers up to a comprehensive, fully wireless monitoring that offers the benefits of rapid deployment, low maintenance, and real-time collection of accurate data.

Click here to find out about the Loadsensing LS-G6 (by Worldsensing), the ideal wireless monitoring for this application.