Veteran Canadian mining engineer Ian McKechnie has been encouraged by the speed of development and deployment of tailings management software by a large engineering services firm in what is another sign of the industry’s increasing will to match available technology to long-standing technical and manpower problems.
“When the Global Industry Standard on Tailings Management [GISTM] first came in it seemed like we had to instrument everything and catch up 50 years in the space of five years,” Hatch lead product manager McKechnie said on an Austmine webinar on tailings dam management innovations.
“We haven’t usually added more people to the practice of tailings management, unfortunately, not that there’s that many [qualified and trained tailings engineering] people available.
“But we are putting more responsibility on the people that are currently in those jobs, often without increasing resources in there to support them.
“For me as an engineer, isn’t it time that tailings folks got good tools?”
McKechnie spent more than 13 years at BHP and stepped up his search for better software to support tailings dam managers and management while working for Anglo American.
The niche market segment is currently seeing relatively fast-paced innovation in the sensor and software area, led by a range of established and emerging firms. It follows the continuation of a long-running mining industry trend of tailings dam mismanagement, headlined by the Brumadinho dam collapse in Brazil in 2019.
“We need to get ready for the future,” McKechnie said.
“People don’t tend to stay in their job as long as they used to.
“Operating conditions are definitely changing.
“It is definitely a changing landscape we all operate in.
“In response to that what we found is that we’ve got the ability with newer technology to begin integrating sensor networks. Instead of buying new things we can potentially extend the life of older sensors by integrating the modern tools.
“This includes both older-school automated sensors as well as using increasing amounts of manual data. If you already have a person out in the field collecting information, there’s no reason why that information can’t be brought into a system and promoted at the same level as more expensive brethren.
“We’ve been working on a software solution for the past year and a half.
“This is a chance to actually use better software that is fit for this purpose.
“We know that this isn’t just a monitoring question … We’re working on solving tailings management and moving towards understanding of facility health.
“There’s very close correlations with environmental domains and the external stakeholders’ domains.
“It is good looking where we were nine months ago, building the foundations of this software. We’re moving really fast and fast is good in this case – not that it always is in mining.”
Hatch has been promoting its Tailings Management Solution (TMS) for a few months.
McKechnie said the system had worked with up to 300 sensors integrated simultaneously, “so we know it can scale up and connect a whole bunch of different sensors and different types [of sensors]”.
“We’ve partnered with Google to ensure that we’re at the front end of IoT. And so far, we’re yet to be stumped by a sensor type, including ones that are 20-plus years old [and] have never been connected to before.”
At the back-end, “a lot of investment was made up front to ensure that we have a high-velocity, enterprise grade data system”.
“What that means is that you can pull the data out on your own through Delta shares into Power BI or Tableau, or whatever. If you’ve got some hotshot data scientists out there, some really keen graduate engineers, we’ve tested this part of the system to handle data frequencies at up to four or five data points per second.
“In the tailings world we don’t tend to get that much data, but it means that we can scale up as we need to, and we’re not constrained by our software.”
The TSM incorporates “a GISTM toolset”.
“A lot of people had got to the Excel stage of GSTM compliance quite competently, but now they might be thinking, I’ve got to babysit this thing for the next several years and update it and distribute to various people. And why is it just me doing this?” McKechnie said.
“This is a way to pass out that accountability and authority to other people in an organisation.”
Asked about leveraging “newer AI capabilities”, McKechnie gave his “32-second response”.
“It would take probably another hour to answer that one fully,” he said.
“AI is still at a fairly early phase for many of these applications and in a safety context you generally have to be really careful how you implement it.
“Having said that, we’ve already seen AI have broad success and broad applicability in changing how we interface with systems. So, asking questions and having more conversations rather than pre-building a lot of things. Iit means you can kind of get a lot more bang for the buck by having an AI interface to help you out with some things.
“The other area is very exciting.
“With this increase in complexity we see in monitoring, AI has a role to play in sifting a little bit of signal from the noise and helping people on the ground pay attention to four things a day rather than 40 things a day.”
