[VIDEO] How will the Internet of Things impact Australian mining manufacturers?
Imagine a mining industry where miners and manufacturers have complete insight into their machinery and operations. Predictive maintenance? Locating and streamlining areas of productivity improvement in operations?
With the Internet of Things, it won’t be a problem.
The Internet of Things (loT) is expected to become a major component to the next generation of mining, and manufacturing is likely to be a large part of this. By 2020, approximately 26 billion objects will be linked together by the lnternet of Things.
For Australian mining manufacturers, the need for loT is imperative as the region has been hit hard by falling commodity prices and increasing operational costs. Recent research suggests most manufacturers believe the loT will have a positive impact on their business, however, the majority do not have a plan set in place.
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According to Mining Global, mining equipment company Joy Global has already jumped on the bandwagon, joining forces with Boston-based software company PTC to equip its operations center with PTC software to monitor maintenance needs, environmental metrics and safety conditions deep underground.
The platform has enabled Joy Global to optimize their remote monitoring and analytics processes around connected devices, allowing them to:
• Anticipate failures
• Efficiently respond to equipment problems reducing equipment downtime
• Reduce the cost of mining resources
• Improve the safety of the site and human capital
• Optimize mining production
“It lets our customers focus on things that could take the system down,” said Joy Global President Ted Doheny. “They get so much data already, that it’s turning data into spam. This [software] turns data into information.”
Doheny adds, “We are taking a significant amount of data off a longwall. We have over 7,000 sensors in a longwall so the data is very, very important, but most importantly is turning the data into information into results: how can we save money, produce more for less?”
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