Mining of the future: real-time communications to allow deep mining.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: MINING

It may sound like something straight from science fiction, but for miners of the future, suits and helmets that monitor their vital signs, regulate their body temperature and communicate to aboveground operators isn't so far from reality.

Sudbury company Jannatec Technologies is working to develop fully connected, wearable gear that would do all these things to help miners go deeper underground.

"We're very good at mining, but our communications and how we move ore and how we move things is still back 30, 40 years. so we have to catch up, and we need higher speed data under there," Jannatec president Wayne Ablitt said. -We have to give the same working tools underground that are above ground, and that's our goal."

Jannatec is one of the partners in the Ultra-Deep Mining Network--established by Sudbury's Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation (CEMI)--focused on four areas of innovation: rock-stress risk reduction, energy reduction, material transport and productivity and human health. The network defines ultra-deep mining as mining taking place up to 2.5 kilometres underground.

Last January, the network received $15 million from the Business Led Network Centres of Excellence; an additional $31 million has come from cash and in-kind contributions.

The further underground miners go, the hotter it gets and the more urgent is the need to cool the body. Currently, noted Pat Dubreuil, the network's research and development program director, some miners in South Africa working at 16,000 feet below ground travel four hours just to get to their worksite. They work in 20-minute intervals, broken up by 20-minute rest periods, to prevent stress on the body.

Jannatec's wearable communications system could do everything from cool a miner's body to monitor for collision avoidance to track their movements underground, all while providing instantaneous communication between miners underground and workers above ground.

"By bringing in technologies such as the one that Jarmatec's working on, we're hoping to improve the output and the productivity of that particular worker, making him able to sustain longer periods of work in their natural environment," Dubreuil said.

Innovation currently on the market doesn't allow for miners to go deeper, and only five mines in Canada qualify as a deep mine. But as ore resources are depleted, going deeper is becoming a necessity, and Canadian companies need to be ready, Dubreuil said.

"It's important to develop that with...