Tailings dams signify a considerable threat for adjoining communities in mining areas. South Africa’s most up-to-date expertise of a tailings dam tragedy, the 2022 collapse of a tailings dam in Jagersfontein within the Free State, led to the deaths of three individuals.
One other 4 had been confirmed lacking with 40 others being taken to hospital. The destruction to housing and different infrastructure within the affected group was within the tens of hundreds of thousands of rands.
Based on Alastair Bovim, CEO of tailings monitoring and analytics platform Perception Terra, tragedies just like the one in Jagersfontein are preventable. Technological advances have given mining engineers the power to observe tailings dams – which comprise huge volumes of mining waste sludge – in actual time.
When engineers have perception right into a dam’s interior actions, composition and the extent of threat posed by exterior occasions equivalent to heavy rains and even earthquakes, pre-emptive motion will be taken.
“Tailings waste is an end result of the mining course of and, relying on the kind of steel being mined, the waste sometimes needs to be saved and managed,” Bovim instructed TechCentral in a latest interview. “Typically it’s dry tailings, so heaps of rocks, however the place the danger lies is with moist tailings.”
Bovim defined {that a} tailings dam is sort of a residing organism that grows as extra sludge is added to it. The wall of the dam is expanded each six months to a 12 months. The gunk on the backside of the dam tends to condense and harden, whereas the highest comprises extra water and is sludgier, he mentioned.
Mining engineers use quite a lot of devices at completely different elements of the dam, together with below it and within the dam wall, to gather information concerning the general atmosphere. Inclinometers, for instance, measure modifications within the slope angles of dam embankments and piezometers measure pore water strain at completely different factors within the dam.
Predictive evaluation
The information is fed into Perception Terra’s cloud-based analytics engine. After it’s processed, significant information factors will be extracted. Based on Bovim, these information factors differ from mine to mine relying on the kind of waste being handled and the character of the exterior atmosphere, so the mine’s engineering crew typically decides which parameters are essential to concentrate to.
The analytics engine additionally builds fashions to carry out predictive evaluation of a tailings dam, sending warnings to crew members when sure parameters are outdoors predefined tolerances or dangers are noticed.
Bovim mentioned the atmosphere a mine is in locations limitations on the forms of applied sciences that can be utilized. Some websites have entry to fibre backhaul or 4G cellular protection, however in probably the most distant environments, satellites are the one web infrastructure obtainable.
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“In some eventualities we gather the whole lot, preprocess the info and compact it by about 70% earlier than sending it into the cloud. In that approach we are able to use the satellite tv for pc connectivity very effectively as a result of it’s often costlier than 4G or 5G,” mentioned Bovim.
Perception Terra’s first undertaking was in Mexico in 2018. The corporate continues to run initiatives in varied elements of the world together with Chile, Norway and South Africa. The mixture of environmental monitoring instruments with information analytics for predictive insights extends past tailings dams; Perception Terra’s different initiatives embrace monitoring land stability in areas the place landslides are a excessive threat and methane gasoline remark in agriculture and oil & gasoline operations.
The World Tailings Evaluate units the trade requirements for mining tailings administration. The World Tailings Administration Institute (GTMI), an unbiased physique created in partnership with the UN Environmental Programme to audit how properly mining firms adhere to the usual, has chosen South Africa as its headquarters. Bovim mentioned GTMI selecting South Africa as its house goes to play an essential function in bettering security requirements within the nation in addition to in growing globally in-demand technical expertise for the tailings administration sector.
Information analytics and internet-of-things expertise are on the core of the Perception Terra platform, however the firm has through the years constructed up an advisory board of subject material specialists in varied facets of the mining course of. This crew, which presents advisory companies to mines as an adjunct to the analytics platform – is made up of specialists in threat administration, operations administration, hydrogeology and different fields, mentioned Bovim.
“We’ve constructed up numerous subject material experience ourselves however we’re nonetheless not engineers, we simply construct what they need to allow them to make selections rapidly and never spend their time misplaced in spreadsheets. Engineers need to spend most of their time making use of their skilled judgment,” mentioned Bovim. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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