Monitoring of Underground Mobile Equipment at Mount Isa Mines Ltd

At Mount Isa Mines, a system has been developed for general monitoring of underground mobile equipment. It can provide unit condition monitoring data such as oil pressures and motor temperatures as well as production type information such as unit location and load. The system does not rely on an expensive data communications infrastructure, using instead inexpensive radio base stations which automatically transfer data from mobile units to a surface database server on the company-wide computer network. This paper includes a general overview of the system and a discussion of the practical benefits it is expected to generate.