Riaan Bergh – Impact Area Manager at the CSIR with responsibility for health and safety-related testing and training services for the mining industry – talks to MechChem Africa about some of the innovative solutions presented at the Investing in African Mining Indaba in Cape Town.
Click to download and read pdf
VR-headset can be used to simulate underground emergency scenarios that help psycho-emotional responses to kick in, which we use to ensure trainees keep cool heads.
At the African Mining Indaba in Cape Town earlier this year, the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI), together with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Mandela Mining Precinct (MMP), showcased an array of technologies aimed at unlocking innovation in the mining industry. “The Mandela Mining Precinct is a CSIR and Minerals Council co-hosted programme funded by the DSI and the Minerals Council South Africa,” begins the CSIR’s Riaan Bergh, a Mechanical Engineer with a Master’s degree in Engineering Management.
The MMP came out of the Mining Phakisa, from which the South African Mineral Extraction, Research, Development and Innovation (SAMERDI) initiative also evolved. “The MMP is a public-private partnership that plays a crucial role in implementing the SAMERDI strategy, managing RD&I programmes executed by research partners and other collaborators such as the CSIR, universities and a number of private institutions,” he adds.
VR-enabled competency based training
The flagship innovation on show at the DTI/CSIR/MMP stand at the Mining Indaba involved highly successful work being done on VR-enabled competency based safety training. “This programme originated from our existing and long-standing safety awareness training for mineworkers. We present these courses on a weekly basis at our Kloppersbos fire and explosion testing, training and R&D facility,” Bergh tells MechChem Africa. “There we can create full scale coal-dust explosions and we have long used this capability to present safety awareness training.
“But we needed to take it a step further. Large explosions are rare nowadays, but underground fires are not. Fires create non-respirable atmospheres, where people cannot breathe due to toxic gases, carbon-monoxide or fumes from burning plastics and rubbers. So we have produced a number of innovations, most notably, in the field of self-rescuer devices, which are now being made by local and international manufacturers. But the specific training gap that we saw was to provide a much better basis for training miners how to respond confidently and effectively in an emergency such as a fire. Hence the shift to competency-based safety training,” says Riaan Bergh.
“This is where virtual reality comes in. If you put a person in front of a training facilitator and show them how to use a self-rescuer, they might pay partial attention. But if you put a VR-headset onto the person while simulating an emergency scenario, the emotions start to flow very quickly. So we create actual underground emergency scenarios that help psycho-emotional responses to kick in, which we use to ensure trainees keep cool heads and make the right decisions while being challenged by the high-pressure VR experience,” he says.
Competence involves the ability to recall and apply the knowledge learned in real emergency situations. But it also enables mine operators to develop and test their response plans to emergency scenarios. What immediate action needs to be taken and how to mitigate the harm done in the event of different emergency situations. “It is fast becoming the tool for developing execution strategies to mitigate against harm,” he says.
Expectation management and confidence
“The physical donning (the deploying of the self-rescuer) needs to be embedded into muscle memory so that users develop unconscious competence. They need to learn through motion, so they can do it quickly and correctly when their lives really are in danger,” Bergh continues.
CSIR’s competence training approach also involves expectation management. “The chemical reaction involved to produce the oxygen in a self-rescuer is exothermic, so a short while after the mouthpiece is put on, the air being breathed is going to feel hot, at around 50° C. In addition, the breathing resistance is higher. This can lead to confusion and panic, people removing the mouthpiece and running to the refuge chamber: a wrong and very dangerous response!
“So we have just developed and patented a small training device called the Expectation Trainer that enables people to experience what it feels like to use a self-rescuer, in terms of the elevated temperature and the additional breathing resistance. It makes the reasons for modulating exertion far more obvious: walk do not run, for example, so that the rate at which oxygen supplied will be sufficient,” he informs MechChem Africa.
Also, some mines are starting to use their end-of-life units as an additional training tool to give people a real experience of what it feels like to wear and use one. “These are single use devices, though, whereas our Expectation Trainer can easily be disinfected and used again – and they are much less expensive than a complete functioning self-rescuer device, so a mine’s whole workforce can be put through expectation training,” he says.
The last aspect of CSIR’s competency based training is putting all of the developed competencies together in a realistic environment: “We take trainees into a mock up mine and create an emergency scenario. The lights go out, we blow in smoke and blast disaster-type noises through a sound system, for example. The trainees then need to open and put on their self-rescuers and follow the lifeline to the refuge chamber, all without panic and while doing all the necessary safety checks. Successful completion of the ‘escape’ suggests that the trainee is safety competent and has a good chance of surviving a real emergency,” says Bergh.
The digital twin for trackless mobile machines
Another innovation on show was a digital twin development for collision prevention of trackless mobile machinery (TMM): “In the virtual environment on a cloud platform, we are able to recreate a digital twin of a mine’s whole operations with respect to traffic flow. The system looks at how vehicles move around a mine and, most importantly, how they interact with each other,” Bergh explains. The initial motivation for the system was driven by transport-related accidents, hence Chapter Eight Regulations of the Mine Health and Safety Act, which states that wherever there is a significant risk of collision, mine vehicles needs to be fitted with a fail-safe machine intervention system that can slow and stop the vehicle autonomously (as per Level-9 of Earth Moving Machine Safety Round Table’s defensive layers of control).
To install this system on all the vehicles in a mine is prohibitively expensive, though. “So the digital twin was developed to assist in quantifying collision risks, non-conformances, and identifying vehicles most at risk. The system collects actual GPS data from mobile machines and uses numerical models and machine learning to model the movement of the vehicles and derive vehicle-interactions and non-conformance insights, helping mine operators to make informed choices about risk mitigation and/or accurately identifying which vehicles need Level-9 intervention technology,” he says.
“Also, though, it quickly became clear that we could also use the system as a productivity optimisation tool, because in the same way as you can model risk outcomes, we can also optimise traffic management, say, by monitoring speed, route, or dispatching parameters, for example. By doing so, we can see which scenario gives the best productivity outcome for the whole system, so instead of simply identifying collision-risk vehicles, we are able to optimise operations for a mine’s entire mobile vehicle fleet,” Bergh tells MechChem Africa.
Rock Engineers Assistant (REA)
Bergh went on to describe another digital solution being developed for Industry, which consists of a platform that will run a number of applications aimed specifically to assist rock engineering practitioners. “This solution originates from one of our own rock engineers with inside knowledge of the difficulties involved with implementing rock engineering related practices on the mines”.
REA aims to assist the practitioner in identifying underground hazardous conditions or situations by considering several related data sources simultaneously and will eventually also assist with technical development and with some typical calculations performed by rock engineers. The REA platform is planned to continuously expand as additional applications are identified, researched, developed and coded.
He says South African gold and platinum ore bodies are narrow and tabular in nature, with a small stoping width making it difficult to identify rock related hazards and hazardous practices in the confined space. Anything that can assist the mines, and specifically the rock engineering practitioners to design, assess, record and report underground conditions, installed support and general mining practices more efficiently and reliably, contributes towards a safer and more productive environment.
Drone mounted Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR)
Lastly, Riaan Bergh pointed towards current CSIR research partly funded by CoalTech: the use of a drone platform for Ground Penetrating Radar. “GPR is widely accepted for assessing the safety of mine walkways, for example, which may have areas of subsidence. Traditionally, this is done using a radar antenna mounted on a trolley that has to be wheeled across the surface being assessed,” he explains.
“By mounting the radar antenna onto a drone, we are able to set up a flight path to safely cover inspection areas that are difficult or hazardous to access on foot in a fraction of the time that it would take ground-based crews. The digital data is then used to create a report of the ground condition, enabling its condition and reparation needs to be assessed quickly,” he says
“Many people think that the focus on safety involves making sacrifices elsewhere. That is certainly the case in some instances, but in many cases, we have shown that the application of virtual reality, digital twins and other innovative tools can help to improve both safety and productivity at the same time,” Riaan Bergh concludes.