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Legacy silver miner embraces latest underground mining tech Metallic Tech Info – February 17, 2021
Established in 1891, Hecla Mining Agency has survived two worldwide pandemics, two World Wars, the Good Melancholy, and fairly a number of crests and troughs of a cyclical metals market that has sunk a number of the silver miner’s contemporaries over the earlier 130 years. Certainly one of many causes for this long-lived success is a readiness to adapt to change and the imaginative and prescient to undertake new utilized sciences that maximize safety, improve effectivity, and reduce the environmental footprint of its operations within the US, Canada, and Mexico.
“The one issue that is certain is change, so we have to proceed to get increased every day, in either side of what we do,” acknowledged Hecla Mining Vice President of Exterior Affairs Luke Russell. “We don’t depend upon ‘successfully that is the method we did it yesterday,’ there is also a better method.”
This mindset of utilizing the latest utilized sciences to repeatedly improve operations is on full present at Hecla’s Greens Creek Silver Mine in Southeast Alaska.
Thanks largely to the implementation of twenty first century utilized sciences, resembling high-speed wi-fi and semi-autonomous mining instruments, Greens Creek produced 10.5 million ounces of silver in 2020, which is roughly 77% of the 13.5 million oz recovered from all of Hecla’s operations last yr.
“This undoubtedly won’t be your grandfather’s mine,” Hecla Greens Creek Mine penned on the enhancements net web page of its web page.
Connection is important
The centerpiece of the cutting-edge mining utilized sciences being utilized at Greens Creek is a high-speed wi-fi info swap system that options miles of communication cables and wi-fi hotspots that be a part of the working areas of the underground mine.
Hecla acknowledged this connectivity provides real-time info on the place every particular person and piece of equipment is located, even inside the labyrinth of underground passages extending better than a mile beneath the earth’s ground.
Initially put in as a safety measure to permit radio frequency identification (RFID) know-how to help monitor workers and instruments, the high-speed wi-fi info swap offered by this underground wi-fi group permits a broad range of utilized sciences.
Due to this you normally are likely to see an underground worker at Greens Creek pull out a capsule with real-time info than reams of paper to take notes which will should be transferred to the company’s laptop system after they get once more to the ground.
“The geologists can go into that work area and fairly than having 20 maps with him, he has a capsule and he seems up the face map, the mine plans for that area, from that capsule,” acknowledged Bob Haecker, mill supervisor at Greens Creek.
Further autonomy
The wi-fi underground group at Greens Creek moreover permits for the operation of completely distant and semi-autonomous mining instruments from the ground.
The first of such instruments, put to work at Greens Creek in 2017, was a remotely operated semi-autonomous long-haul dump loader working all through shift modifications at Greens Creek.
An operator sitting behind a monetary establishment of laptop shows on the ground runs the LHD on the first go, instructing the machine the place to load and dump, after which the loader repeats the tactic.
Working by two shift modifications a day, each taking about two hours, this avant-garde piece of equipment provides the mine with about 4 further hours of ore hauling daily on the underground operation.
Hecla says one different advantage of the autonomous LHD, which has proximity detectors that cease it from working into totally different objects, is its potential to operate sooner with out working into partitions than the identical loader with a human being jostled spherical inside the driver’s seat.
With the success of this semi-autonomous loader, Hecla says it is adopting automated, jumbo stope drilling and shaft operations between shifts. The company will also be growing its utilization of tele-remote and battery-powered loaders and vans at its operations.
The company says these emissions free and unmanned instruments “reduces air circulation requirements, improves worker safety, and lowers emissions.”