Development of Effective Technology for Online Slope Monitoring in Opencast Mines- R&D Initiative

Abstract

This paper presents overview of accidents due to ground control problems in Indian mines along with the impetus on the need of innovative applications of trans-disciplinary work for improving safety in mines, and need based industry oriented research. Recent disaster on 29.12.2016 at about 7 pm due to slope failure at Rajmahal mines ECL, indicated the lacuna in providing sufficient information to the employees engaged near the working places about the impending danger, which would have saved few lives with effective online data/alarm to the persons engaged below the working benches/slopes at right time. Accidents due to slope instability are one of the primary causes in open pit mining operations, and unpredicted movement of the ground causes the potential to endanger lives, demolish equipment, or destroy property. Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) is gaining widespread attention as a cost-effective method to monitor ground movements in soil and rock. It has been used successfully for many years to monitor deep-seated failures in soil deposits and for monitoring many different kinds of movements in rock masses.

This article describes the integration of TDR directly with Arduino boards and XBee modules for real-time transmission of slope monitoring data. This system is being developed as a part of Ministry of Mines, Government of India (GOI) sponsored project, which is useful for real-time slope monitoring of the slope movements using TDR. Laboratory investigations were conducted using TDR without data logger for real-time transmission of data generated by TDR. For the purpose, interfacing modules, Arduino boards, XBee modules are used and software modules are developed using Arduino-Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Software. The data captured by the TDR was successfully transmitted using developed integrated system.