Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology
School of Engineering
Department of Mining Engineering
Selected Highlights from Research Findings
Monitoring the condition of a mine road is critical in minimising the cost of transport at a mine. Researchers in the Departments of Mining, Civil and Bio-Systems and Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering are developing a multi-disciplinary approach to solve the problem of road maintenance, using mine truck on-board data.
These ultra-heavy mine trucks, often weighing over 500 tons, with tyres more than 2,4 meter in diameter and one meter wide, are susceptible to rough roads and research has already shown that the truck can feel road defects as small as 60mm in height.
The system being developed - known as Condition Triggered Maintenance or CTM - uses the measured response of the truck to locate and recognise the defect in the road – thereby enabling the mine to respond and fix the road problem in near real-time.
This is a significant improvement on previous types of road maintenance in which the road was fixed only at irregular intervals.
The research has been awarded several prizes including the South African Institute of Civil Engineers Transportation Engineering Division best paper award.
Currently, the research team, in conjunction with Electronic Engineering, are building a prototype event recorder for a 350 ton Komatsu truck, on which a production trial will eventually be based.
RJ Thompson
Mining Engineering
+27 (0) 12 420 3195
roger.thompson@up.ac.za
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