Chinalco Smart Mine Equipment Monitoring & Energy Acquisition Case

Chinalco Smart Mine Equipment Monitoring & Energy Acquisition Case
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CHALCO Smart Mine Equipment Monitoring and Energy Data Acquisition Case

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CHALCO Smart Mine Equipment Monitoring and Energy Data Acquisition Case

1. Project Background

Pingguo Jiaomei Mine is an important project of CHALCO Guangxi Branch, located in Jiucheng Town, Pingguo County. Its main construction content includes an open-pit stope, industrial site, office and living area, sludge conveying system, external transport roads and supporting facilities, with a scale of 2 million tons of qualified bauxite per year, a total investment of RMB 980 million and a two-year construction period.

With strong support and guidance from Chinalco Group and Chinalco Co., Ltd., and the joint efforts of CHALCO Guangxi Branch and the project design, construction and supervision units, the Jiaomei bauxite mine construction project was completed and put into production on 25 June 2022 after a 10-month construction period. To improve the enterprise’s intelligent manufacturing level and advance the Guangxi Branch’s plan to “create a benchmark for China’s bauxite mines”, we needed to seize the opportunity of building Jiaomei Mine from a blank sheet into a comprehensive, brand-new, high-standard showcase — raising labor productivity and strengthening the intrinsic safety of the benchmark mine through intelligent means.

However, during construction Jiaomei Mine still faced problems affecting safe operation and production: vehicle technical condition could not be monitored in real time, vehicle hazards could not be detected in time, driver behavior could not be monitored in real time and effective restraints on drivers had not been formed. If these problems were not solved in time there would be great safety risks, but the mine’s current hardware and software configuration clearly could not meet the needs.

Therefore Jiaomei Mine urgently needed a smart mining safety operation management platform to monitor the operating data of various equipment in real time, visualize mining-site operations, standardize safety management processes and track safety hazard handling throughout, ensuring the safety of site, vehicles and personnel. The platform should also generate safety-related information logs for timely risk reminders, efficient problem handling and traceable root causes, helping Jiaomei Mine build a “people-oriented” benchmark for China’s bauxite mines.

2. Requirement Analysis

  1. Hard safety monitoring: the mining area is large, the mining points are scattered and the terrain is complex, making safety conditions hard to monitor.
  2. Long shifts: a two-shift system with 12 hours per shift makes drivers prone to fatigue, with no safeguard measures other than personal willpower.
  3. Slow information: mining-site conditions cannot be monitored in real time and equipment operating data cannot be obtained in real time.
  4. Short-staffed management: the mining company’s equipment inspection staff each manage more than 15 devices across several major brands, making timely, accurate management difficult.
  5. Difficult statistics: most equipment data collection relies on manual work, making timeliness, completeness and accuracy hard to guarantee and leaving equipment efficiency statistics without effective data support.

Core hardware data acquisition requirements: real-time monitoring of the working hours, electricity consumption and water consumption of equipment such as flow meters and belt scales, with data statistics to achieve the following goals:

  • Improve efficiency: identify production-line bottlenecks and optimize processes through monitoring and analysis.
  • Save cost: achieve energy saving and emission reduction and lower operating costs by monitoring energy consumption.
  • Preventive maintenance: predict potential faults and perform maintenance in advance by monitoring equipment status.
  • Data-driven decisions: provide management with accurate data support for more scientific decisions.

3. Project Solution

Ore belt-scale acquisition solution

Sedimentation tank flow-meter acquisition solution

Water supply pump station electricity acquisition solution

Overall architecture diagram

4. Project Implementation

  1. Daq-IoT assigned professional implementation engineers to the Pingguo Jiaomei Mine site in Guangxi to coordinate installation and commissioning with the on-site electricians.

Commissioning of the lake water supply pump station ultrasonic flow meter

Installation of current monitoring sensors for ore-washing equipment in the distribution room

Platform-side equipment operation monitoring interface