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Transport Taps Into Radio Tags
It is no bigger than a beer mat, requires no direct power supply and can be used in ways to increase safety and efficiency.
Technology known by the acronym RFID, which stands for Radio Frequency IDentification, is cropping up in more and more places underground, mostly because it is an excellent way of tracking things.
That is why it is making its way into everything from underground materials transport systems to escape and rescue.... and at Daw Mill Colliery it is already being used to give protection when the 1,200m long rope haulage drift is operating.
Tiny tags are attached to every cap lamp battery and have sensors that help log men's positions. The "smart" tags are wirelessly connected to bi-directional antenna, with readers placed at both ends of the drift so that anyone entering automatically trips the engine. And they won't allow the driver to re-start the engine until every person has left the area.
"It works much like a barcode, but insead of having to be passed in front of a scanner, tiny transponders send out radio signals. Each tag is unique so any one person, or item can be tracked individually," says electrical engineer Neil Battison.
"With the RFID system it's as near to 100% read accuracy as you can possibly get. In fact our target for this project is 99.8% accuracy, and we have been exceeding that."
The precision and accuracy of RFID is a huge advantage but its use on a 1-in-4 drift that removes the need to have sentries posted top and bottom of the drift and takes away the slog of a tiring and consuming walk is just one use for the technology.
"We've looked for proven technology to provide safety protection - and this is cutting edge technology," says Neil.
Later this year the Warwickshire pit hopes to be the first in the country to use the technology to assist in the logistics of moving transport by putting a system onto free-steered vehicles and locomotives to monitor each vehicle's progress and where they are in the operational transport system.
There are many other applications including taking it up as an essential safety aid as well as enabling the pit to respond quickly and efficiently to any emergency incident by keeping track of mineworkers positions through a supervisisory control and data acquistion (SCADA) system being developed.
"Whether transponders are outbye or at an entrance to a heading where we might need to track operationally, I can certainly foresee that will be the future. It will come; it is only a question of when and how fast," says Neil.
