MN 36: Silixa, Critical Measurement Challenges & Fibre-Powered Data Solutions

hello welcome to mining now i'm your host jared downey uh joining me in a moment is gaudi molina i say in a moment because we have the two guests set up which means gowdy is running more computers so she is um behind the scenes making sure everything's working properly two very interesting guests today um we're featuring selexa now slixa is set up uh to develop and commercialize the next generation of optical fiber sensors to clarify this is a mining show we're not talking about fiber optics in your home we're talking about sensor technology and data collection and it is very it's all about sustainability it's about facilitating efficiency in this mind obviously a huge topic so uh solixa was kind enough to provide two experts in the field so that we could sort of get it from both sides um we're gonna have zara anderson vp of mining and uh garth nelbret he is a chief product products officer at uh selixa so before we do that we're going to bring in our for gowdy to give a shout out to 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handling needs you want to visit powerzone.com in addition to their inventory rebuilt pumps motors engines they also have an amazing team to design and engineer your systems no matter the challenge no matter the location get in the zone with power zone visit them at powerzone.com okay welcome back welcome to the show zara and garth it's great to have you on lots to cover today um welcome to the show thanks for having us son thank you john yeah um okay let's just jump let's just jump right into it um i think uh i think zara i'll start with you sort of that um actually let's start with just briefly what both of your positions are with the company just to give context of sort of where you specialize in sure i i'll i'll go first um i'm the vp of mining which is a newer business unit division at selexa and the whole goal and objective is to bring the fiber sensing technology into the mining section which is a lot of applications exciting times and so i i came on board about back in january so my expertise is all geotechnical engineering mining for over 20 years um fairly new at the fiber optics technology but i've had a lot of support such as garth and the team at alexa to get me up to speed with that and how about you garth where do you sort of come from in the company good thanks uh so as you mentioned i'm a product officer here at selexo so i work with the technology teams and transfer those uh technologies into products for a customer you know they don't want to look at bits and bytes of data or temperatures acoustics they want to know what's going on in the mind or they want to know what's going on in the oil well or the asset so that's my job to bring technology together create solutions and products out of that yeah that's uh that that could be a show in itself that topic um on the mining side uh zara i wanna garth what i'm gonna i think i'm gonna set up the interview to do is have you sort of give some of that a little bit of what you touched on so to unpack the products from a sort of a macro level and across industry and sort of the value they add but before i jump into that section sorry i wanted to sort of set the scene for mining because obviously we talk a lot about sensor technology there has been talk about fiber on the show um can you just sort of set the industry um sort of layout landscape if you will and as it relates to uh to selexa as well sure yes i mean mining itself the industry is going through a lot of changes and jared and you know it's exciting times if especially if you like change uh it's very different than it was 20 years ago and multiple fronts esg issues sustainability environment governance it's all it's not a big topic by itself in addition mining's role in decarbonization in the future um so that's that's where the mining you know industry is really leading uh feeling that demand uh and then mining itself um digitization and technology adoption is a big topic over the last few years to improve productivity because mining grade or grade is going lower remove their areas rising labor costs many permit issues access to funds issues and so the industry needs technologies that are sustainable environmental friendly central you know ability to remote access and help the minds to improve their productivity and safety so that kind of in parallel with what alexa is offering and the entire distributed fiber optic sensing technology is uh it's just a great timing and opportunity to to and just introduce this technology into mining um and guard will build on that but the technology itself basically you run one cable multiple fiber inside uh low power central uh you know remote access and you do multiple measurements with that one cable fiber so for large volumes whether it's the rod mass or the tailings or the processing plant you get real-time automated data reduces your footprint environmental footprint reduces your power consumption and gives you a lot more access and control over your processes and mining operations across the line uh so i think it's just exciting times um to to be i had select sign weights alexander at the show today to to talk about this technology well it's it's great to see the mining industry i've said it many times in the show wanting to talk i remember a few years ago when you started the show there was i mean granted we were also in much smaller shows people didn't know us so that's fair um but there was a hesitancy the people said talk for an hour about our company we we don't want to do that and now i mean we just do show after show after show because people want to get out they want to talk to people they want feedback they want to show how they're communicating their their technology i wanted to kind of um before again before we jump into gar section zara i wanted to um you touched on it briefly but you know you have a nice chart here and we had talked about we've talked about on the show you know these separate buckets of technology that land in these mine sites but i think i kind of just want to highlight quickly that celixa is they are really offering a portfolio right across in all different applications in the mining operation is that do i have that right correct yes yes so basically i can just summarize there's three areas one one is on the geotechnical monitoring and rock master stability and you know failing the stability where the focus is on the safety aspect of the solution so basically in real time if in underground if you're running fiber what's happening in terms of microseismic activity strain and deformation in the rock mass any kind of fault and geological structures activation to give you a heads up and give you a better understanding of the rock mass reaction to mining operations so it's a huge focus on the mining and the safety side of it uh when it comes to tailings monitoring and with recent years and the failures and the impact the environmental impact that any failure has then again that's that's become a big topic and with fiber the ease of installation running cable at the construction of the site at palings or even afterwards gives you a lot of parameters to measure temperature and seepage in real time you can monitor seismicity whether it's induced seismicity or seismic surface for subsurface imaging as well as the strain and movement and dam bridge in case there is a failure you can get alerted on it in real time so again not only on the safety aspect of it but also the bigger management of tailings the bigger minimizing the risk of environmental impact and impact on the communities and uh and when you go to the third portfolio that we can talk a little bit more in depth to it's the process monitoring side of it so the same fundamentals of fiber sensing technology is used in the processing plant where fiber is wrapped around the pipes across the processing plant from the hydrocyclones to flotation cells and thickner area and you can do flow measurement in real time highly accurate remote automated and it gives you ability to do water management especially in areas with water problems and water scarce regions such as south africa where we've had some installations so you can do water consumption weather you can have a much better control over the process especially with varying org rates under flotation cells you want to measure the quantity and quality uh so that's that's another area that um selexo's portfolio of services fits with the environmental needs uh with water management needs and safety and real-time monitoring and we can build on it a little further uh later in the show but with angular american we've been working and we've been actually partnering as part of their future smart uh mining uh platform uh where angular american got an award in the best use of smart technology for sustainability using our fiber wrap technology in one of their plants in south africa and then since then we've been expanding that system across multiple angle american sites uh in in latin america and uh soon in australia as well you know i got to have um i got to have to sit on a uh on a panel i got to host the panel i keep saying i sat on it i i hosted it i was not part of the panel um with with their ceo mark kudafani and uh and they're they they're the leadership that that company has their outlook is is is interesting so it's neat to hear you work with them because i kind of i got a window into sort of how they how they approach it and they're very uh they're very on it let's just put it that way garth i want to jump over to you for this because uh you know i think zara really out outlined it nicely sort of from the mining perspective but these things were talking about you know sustainability social license safety um obviously tailing facility is very mining specific but water water management did a lot digitalization all the things that that um that celixa is is involved in can you talk a little bit about that from a a little more of a macro perspective across like across industry and sort of those those problems that you're you're you're solving for people yeah absolutely i mean those issues across a lot of the sectors that we work in and you know we're working in also oil and gas for example a lot of our heritages from that background very very similar sort of issues over there so uh you know the beauty of fiber is uh is a sort of term that we use pervasive sense in when you have a distributed sensor that is measuring along its entire length so if you take 10 kilometers of fiber we measuring every meter along that uh by the point and so we can kind of have this monitoring at every point in the plant or any point in the process and so what we've learned in oil and gas we can kind of take that flow metering solution that we take from boiling gas we can put it into mining so when it comes to optimizing your my plant a lot of that optimization is through digitalization but you can't have digitalization without data and this pervasive sensing all this data that the fiber optic system is doing is kind of then feeding to that uh digitalization aspect of it as well so those sustainability goals uh efficiency goals are very common in a lot of these other industries and we've been able to transfer that quite effectively across to the mining sector and whether that's for process optimization or mechanical earth modelling is another area you know when we're looking at uh strain monitoring what we do in subsurface train monitoring and oil and gas transfers very readily across into the mining sector or when we're looking at induced seismicity actually getting from oil and gas fields and operations again very transferable across into the mining sector and i think that's the benefit it's a a new capability opened by fiber optic sensing technology that becomes very transferable across sectors now it's our this has been to since 2007 um that celixa has been offering these services so as are a lot of companies now adopting it across industry or is it still new and i just wanted to clarify this it's still new to a lot of companies or are there rapid adoption right now no 2007 is still quite young for a lot of industries you know we look at the uh a lot of our industries you know 10-year adoption of new technology is fairly common you know i think kind of whether it's mining oil and gas or any of these large industries they tend not to move too quickly so and if you take 2007 when we started it was very much in the academic aspect developing the uh the systems and so you know the first three to four years was really proving that this could be done you know this was really involving the scientists the engineers the lab work so commercial systems were probably 2011 2012. i mean are we at that 10-year point now where we're really coming to say okay we've been in this ten years we've done the field test we've proven the capability and i think now we're starting to see that rapid increase and mining is probably uh you know really at the forefront of that i think uh people like you mentioned anglo got a very poor forward-looking insight to this they realize smart mining what can they do how can they optimize uh they need measurements they need ways to optimize so i think it's really starting to see that update now i wonder i can oh yeah please go ahead sorry i just wanted to add you know jared it's a really good point from industry to industry how they adopt technologies but also as it relates to distributed fiber optic sensing by itself it's a technology that's rapidly growing and it's quite emerging across multiple sectors so i was reading a report a couple of months ago that i was saying the size of um distributed fiber optic sensing market is uh it was estimated at around 1.1 billion for 2001. um to 2021 this year and it's rapidly growing at a rate of 10.5 percent i'm looking at it right now over the next five years and it's going to be at around close to 2 billion by 2026 and there are a couple of areas in civil applications oiling oil and gas transportation mining and some of the reasons for that significant growth across multiple sectors was that it is a cost-effective system it is centralized and it's low power uh providing multiple measurements uh so as it comes to fiber it has also that elevated i guess application that makes it less challenging compared to other technologies to kind of pop you know as pollinator as i guess in different industries and mining historically has been a little bit more conservative yeah but i think with this one we'll see we'll see more rapid change and an adoption of it we are we're certainly seeing we're certainly seeing a shift in mining there was someone on the show and i'm forgetting who it was they they just came on and they were saying we were talking about um you know mining was a little slow to get to the table but now they're all piling in to the room you know that's true yes i mean i was reading uh there was a paper um at the cim conference actually and they were talking uh this group a stratalist talking about how they went across multiple industries to see their technologies and then they presented it to their clients and they actually adopted a few of those technologies that were quite new to mining so it's exciting to see that you know it's opening up and it's uh it's catching up and maybe exceeding the other industries yeah well that that's and that's the part that i really like especially i mean i host other shows but uh but it's nice to see that all sudden mining is like no we're not just gonna keep up we're going to actually get out ahead i mean this like i said this show it used to be very basic sort of technology driven stuff and like you know heavy duty pumps and now we still do those shows but now the technology is just inundated in this show and it's fantastic um garth i want to jump over to you just we've kind of touched on it but i actually want to get into the nuts and bolts of it because there's going to be a lot of people that watch you know they you hear distributed sensing um we've got a little little uh sort of gif here that i'm watching on my screen it goes over and over this little red line goes through it can you tell us what it actually how it works to the to the best of your ability no okay i'll try and sort of make it uh easy enough to understand jared and you know you touched the point in the beginning that most people when you say fiber optics they think in telecommunication and yeah that's definitely you know the main application that purposes all the internet traffic that's going around the world between uh different continents that's all fiber optic based we're not using it for transferring data it does as an analog system it's not a digital system like the uh telecommunication but what we are making use of is uh scattering within the fiber so we send this very short pulse of light in that respect is like communication five which in the short parts of light down but we're not looking at the light signal being received at the other end we look at the scattering that comes back from the fiber and so the fiber optic properties change according to the presence of things around it so if the temperature changes the scattered light coming back changes you've got something called stokes anti-states fans and they temperature sensitive we can also look at the acoustic sensor because the the strain on the fiber also changes the scattering coming back so all of these properties we can look at either temperature acoustics or strain from this fiber optic system and it's quite beautiful because it's a really small sensor it's 250 microns a quarter of a millimeter in diameter so it's very small easy to put this right across your plant and as i was saying in the beginning every meter along that fiber you get the measurement of acoustics temperature and strain so you can now imagine what you can start to understand you know if you're looking at structural change if you see your mind and you're worried about a fault or a structural positional change you can look at that strain change if you're worried about a process plant overheating you can look at the temperature so very very uh widely adaptable to all different parts of the mind and the process you know if you're if you're someone who like yourself who knows you might laugh at my question here but was fiber optic um was it designed for telecommunications um and and for internet and all these things that it gets used for primarily and then somebody you know a company like solixa did they come along and say hey we can use this for something else or was that sort of i know maybe you don't know the answer to this but was it developed with the realization that it could be used for this sort of data collection uh no it was as you say it was primarily for telecommunication that was the kind of early thoughts and you know this is uh cal was the original uh you know should we say the original uh guy who came up with a lot of the telecommunication requirements back in the 60s and 70s but fibers then weren't very good they were quite high last they were quite cloudy if you sort of think of them in that respect you couldn't get very far and you know in the 1970s early 80s they made big changes and they suddenly realized this is something that could not only just go over a few hundred meters could go thousands of kilometers and then in the 1980s people started taking principles from other areas uh roman backscattering which had been grouped in other materials they realized that hanging this could be applied to fiber optic sensors and a lot of the early work where people like university of southampton were the first ones doing uh distributed temperature sensing on these fibers and so a lot of it has been driven by academic uh research and i think that was the challenge for a company like stelixer as well that came out of university ideas a lot of uh very smart guys a lot of phds in the company guys have proven the principles but the challenges then commercializing that making sure you can do it repeatedly reliably and on scale and you know i think that's where we've really try to push these principles out and not only demonstrate that it's a scientific possibility but it's a commercial uh repeatable process now how do you do that that that's it that is a in that what you just said alone is one of the biggest there is this huge gap and i think it's closing i think probably the amount of the amount of information that can be shared in the time it can be shared i mean you got to remember i mean 20 years ago you couldn't sit on a like we we built this off a google doc you couldn't sit there and in real time on zoom update from a completely different part of the world be updating documents i mean there was just the speed that you can can accelerate communication now is amazing just that alone helps that conversion and that's probably why celixa would was founded i assume how challenging is that that conversion from an academic and a scientific application to now we're going to go to one of the biggest mining companies in the world or the biggest oil and gas company in the world and we're going to tell them to implement this into their entire system which is a i mean just the layers of of the chain of command you have to go through to convince people to do that is is a feat in itself so can you talk a little bit about just getting it yeah it could be that commercialization no absolutely yeah and i think it's uh there's a few layers in the company that you have to go through and stages of the company and i think you've got to recognize you know we're eventually capital backed company and so the early years the venture capital teams were quite uh prepared to be patient and say look we're not going to be making money we have to develop technology first but then they also realize that look now the technology is commercial we have to tell the engineers to not make it perfect at some point we've got to say right you've got a very good system over there commercialize that one and take a commercial product to market you can't be bringing r d units along all the time that's fine when you field testing but you've got to then lock it down and the next stage i think of the company's growth uh came when you know we started to create dedicated disciplined business sectors yeah and so uh hence why zara is here to help us in the mining sector you know very specific guitar understands that sector very well understands what the business requirements are the commercial requirements the technical requirements and so we have these business sectors in uh mining oil and gas environmental so all of these are very disciplined business sectors that can you know give those requirements back to the technology teams but i think what has helped us as well when we were talking about uh cross-sector and taken to the cross sectors we've been able to uh take their learnings from one sector and make sure that you know when you're growing very quickly like the mining sector if you grow too quickly you can be inundated with service quality issues but when you've got background and experience in other sectors you realize what type of private you need to deploy that's going to be reliable how do you manage this data so you can actually scale up incredibly quickly because you've learned those lessons in other sectors so i think that was the key for us you know developing a really really good technology is very key very important and i don't want to underestimate what that team has done what is important selixer is that you know we have the best temperature measurement the best acoustic measurements so having this high fidelity enable us to run applications that maybe others couldn't so that fertility and performance is very key to us and you know underpins the company but then linking it to the business sector is what makes it commercially successful right you touch on something um that i i think is is very interesting and i i'm drawing blanks today on some of these people that have said these neat things on the show but one of the discussions i had um this is almost two years ago now was that if you're developing a new technology some mistakes that a company can make can they can spend 90 percent of the time on one percent of the problem and that can really delay commercialization is that sort of what you're referring to where you know it it's never perfect right you always there's always room to improve sometimes you don't even know what the improvement needs to be um and were you sort of were you part of some of those choices to say okay this is time yes without the r d team yeah no absolutely i think kind of those little improvements will help along the way but at some point you've got to say now it is good enough it's exceeds the customer's requirements you know and uh i guess there's a hygiene level that i'd call it you know beyond which you get minimal further gain and then it becomes much more important to make the system robust and reliable than to maybe make it a higher performance and we have got different sectors where those requirements might differ so you know we still work with a lot of the national labs and universities these guys always want the highest performance and reliability is less of an issue to them but you know when we're going to big mining customers reliability is also very important so we can't compromise performance for reliability so it's understanding the trade-offs and uh where to go so you know a lot of the systems go go out right now uh you know he's an r d choice but then it also gets handed over to a production department and that'll fully test the system over the pool operating temperature range before you give it to a customer do shotgun vibration testing so all of these are much more important to a commercial customer than maybe a university who's just focused on performance so you've got to get to the good performance first that's of course what you must do but once you've got there make sure it's robust and commercial yeah it's uh you know that that whole process of doing that i would love to you know i think one day we're actually going to do a panel um i just thought of that we should do a panel one you know someone like yourself have people from different with different applications come in and just talk about the r d and to commercialization it's a fascinating topic um zara i want to jump over to you for a moment for the um we're going to talk a little bit more about the mining but i wanted to talk a little bit about you as a professional um with your background that you touched on the beginning of the show when you come on to a company like celixa is it do you pick up pretty quick what what they're offering because because of your background or is it was there a lot to learn sort of to then be ready to take this out you know professionally into the market and and sort of enter into these uh discussions with mining companies uh good question jared i think um i think it was um it was i wasn't quick to learn uh but it was a great team i had a lot of one-on-ones and group discussions to get up to speed with the technology i still i'm not an expert by any means i still bring a lot of the technical experts in the calls but i think uh the the very interesting part of it was that as i was hearing about the technology and how it works and the applications outside mining i was kind of linking back to hey we can use it here we can use it there especially with with the geotechnical you know expertise and background that i i had well we very rapidly realized there is there's actually a lot of you know areas where fiber can be a very you know matching technology application so um so that's i i worked as a geotech engineer um you know underground mine open pit mine so the the challenge of collecting data and instrumentation making sure they work visualize you know visual uh checkups and bringing everything together and so what's important and what's not and then suddenly you see a completely new technology and how it works and and then the light bulbs go and so on so we had a number of discussions internally uh to kind of just um iron out the issues with what's possible and not and what's visible and then brought those discussions to um to mining contacts and and the mines and we've had so and then it's the more interesting part of it is that then when we sit with the clients and with the minds and talk with them then they also i also offer solutions say well they're actually we have this challenge here and the technology is a good good match so it's more of bringing expertise together um and uh you know and and uh going from that and i think that that's the unique advantage of select size as guard mentioned we bring domain expertise so it's a combination of fiber engineers and the strong rnd team with the domain expertise understanding what the industry needs and then bringing the clients to the table as well we've been very open to say these are you know the possibilities and this is the areas that that's new and we want to develop further and we would love to partner with you such as we've done with anglo-american you know i uh something that came to my mind is that when you when we're having these discussions quite often um i don't i don't get to talk to the minds before us you know a company like yours comes on so i don't know exactly what sort of hang-ups you run into or what questions they would have for you so i want to talk some i want to break down the applications but before we do that when you zara when you come into a room what are what are some of the hang-ups what are some of the questions that people are asking um maybe not even hang ups what are the what's the information that they need clarified or you know where you need to bring in you know a technical team or what have you what what are some of those common questions you're getting good question um i think one of the big things with mining uh you know remote areas especially if you go underground a really challenging working environment so one of the the first questions is how easy it is to install the system uh for underground or open pit mining and so there's quite a lot of discussion around that the logistics of getting fiber either along the tunnel or in boreholes um and so part of it is installation the other big part of it is the data transfer and data integration and the processing of the data so what kind of facilities what kind of servers you need how can you set it up underground or not do you need to time sync it gps time sync it and then what kind of servers you need to manage the data so those are the two key um i guess areas of discussion but a lot of it once it's installed and once that's set up it's the applications of it um that you know the mines can also say we're going to use it for this or we're going to use it as accenzometers or use it as you know jiofun systems um so that's on the geotechnical monitoring side with tailings some similar concepts the installation is a big topic and also because tailings are remote you want the data in real time from anywhere that's a big topic that we can address and then under processing control with the fiber wrap and flow measurement typically the questions are again around um how do you install it at the plant which is which is fairly easy you just wrap the fiber and you're done you don't even interrupt the operation um no shutting down the pipes or anything or cutting the pipes and you retrofit it and then you set it up in a survey room that can be kilometers away and you're set to go and any you know any remote access is possible as well um i i a little tongue-in-cheek but i i was wondering as with your background because you're a geotechnical engineer and um you must do you ever go on these sites and is it hard to not point out things that they that they could do better did we ever try to get a little extra extra consulting out of you and go ahead what about this process i i bet it actually does happen to you well it's funny you say because yeah uh you know i worked at valet and we had a strong ground control geotechnical team you know meeting every month and learning and discussing issues the different sites and how we can make it better and then i uh i travel afterwards with different positions i move i travel to south africa south america a lot and i will go underground for one thing and then i would point out other things and so yeah it's uh it's quite common but i mean it's also very difficult and mining cultures are quite different from region to region and also you know the um productivity and efficiency and monitoring it has to be a balance of cost and value uh so no other no one mind can have everything together so we always kind of go for the best of what's what's optimum you know solution and you can't have one system to answer all your questions you can't have the best ground support you can have the best everything so so yeah it's happened a lot but um i know the answer it's never that easy yeah no i know it's as soon as you were talking about going to decide when oh i realize people are going to be asking you questions it happens does we we produce and we distribute out our content so of course when guests come on the show we almost end up doing like mini consulting work for them as they're putting out their content it's quite kind of funny um let's talk about you you touched on it but i think there's there's three and i want to make sure that the tailings damn the fiber wrap and i think there's a third um i'll let you lay it out louder than me trying to lay it out that's usually how it goes better so can you lay out a couple that let's start with the process monitoring you touched on a little bit but can you just unpack it a little bit more um just from from within working within their operations you already touched on some of the installation parts in that um but could you just add a little bit more to that process monitoring side sure and the process monitoring side um it's fiber wrap it's a technology quite unique to celexa celexa actually has been very good with the advantages over other you know fiber provider sensor providers um there's quite a few patterns as as guard mentioned it's always the focus on the best performance so with fiber wrap it's one of those applications there is a few other uh flow measurement technologies in the market but what selexa is offering is quite unique to celexa with distributed fiber optic sensing so you basically take that one quarter of fiber for 10 kilometers you go across your plant from the uh uh you know hydrocyclones to flotation cells to the thickener area and the areas the pipes you want to monitor the flow in real time you just wrap fiber around it then communication fiber to the next point then you wrap fiber so you can have about 20 25 measurement zones with that one single fiber cable then the fiber gets connected to the interrogator that that's idas unit in a control room kilometers away and then the system in real time gives you the flow the speed of the flow within each pipe of those two 20 zones or so in real time you can remote into the system you can get the output integrate with your data and it's highly accurate so as i mentioned with angle american we've had multiple installations and it's just been a lot of learning for us as well and it came up to you know there's a lot of areas we can develop so uh our ceo was quite strategic to say these are the areas we want to develop now and after about four five years that we have really developed those um to a commercial stage we are now working to do further development of measuring other parameters with uh with other than the flow of of the fluid and so the advantages of this system as i mentioned you don't need any power it's just fiber cable you don't need any mechanical part any data communication infrastructure at the plant it's just the cable does all the work and then it's non-intrusive you can retrofit to any existing pipes small pipes we've installed it on pipes that's as large as 50 inches so it's any kind of material multiphase you know fluid as long as it's turbulent that's the key we can do measurements so the way it works is that every time there is a turbulent flow level of fluid or gas inside the pipe it causes eddies or vortices on the pipe so those kind of micro dynamic strains food strains on the on the pipe that the fiber can pick it up it's so sensitive you can pick it up in the exterior of the pipe then that acoustic signal we change it to um to frequency domain and then we from there we measure the fluid velocity we've done measurements below one meter per second which is a lot of other technologies can't do and we can also kind of do depending on the vortex power as well as the fluid velocity we can also kind of do a little bit of condition monitoring to see if there isn't a lot of settlement for example um within the pipe so it's a technology that's also as we learn more we're developing it further and for angular american i mentioned they they incorporated it the one of one of the key reasons was for them to do water management and conserve water better to manage overflows underflows and in real time better see what the flow is in different regions of the plant and the other criteria they were looking at it was because it was most cost effective uh just because with that one system um you can measure measure multiple points 20 25 point and also low power so they very they were very specific to say that it is in line with uh with with uh with their sustainability objectives you know initiatives of being environmentally robust um bringing technologies that are environmentally robust so that's uh that is on the fiber wrap side there's a lot that i can go on uh about but i don't want to bore your audience they're pretty interesting yeah um i was gonna ask a question though about um about just scale of mind like if if you're a smaller minor mining operation is this is this applicable is this could this be a way um to to sort of uh leap ahead on your sustainability goals and and things like that and efficiency goals or is this application primarily for a larger operation um i think it is depends on what you want to monitor so for example if you say i want to just monitor a small area a few feet by few feet underground or i just want to monitor flow measurements um in you know two or three zones that's not the most cost effective the value of fiber comes when you want to monitor very large volumes or long distances because that cable can run for kilometers 10 20 30 depending on the application and then every meter along it you you technically can do a measurement so then for that you know 10 to 20 kilometer of fiber you just need that one unit of interrogator which is the pricey part of the system so even a smaller mine can have that it's probably more cost effective if you want to monitor a larger volume right okay yeah and i figured that i just wanted to clarify you're just in reference to the point there that you raised about uh applicability of the technology to uh smaller mines and smaller operators you know we found in other industries that the smaller operators are a lot more nimble and they'll pick up on technology quicker than some of the uh big players who you know have more bureaucracy and more inertia around them yeah and this is quite important you know that 10-year introduction phase that we spoke about in the beginning can be a lot smaller when you're an independent and you can use this sort of technology to differentiate you can become more efficient uh you know more sustainable because you're using technology and i think independent smaller operators pick up the nap quicker and hopefully that then transfers to the bigger teams but a lot of the innovations like us as a small company innovation comes from the smaller places and then scales out to the bigger operators so it's really about finding out where that line is of you know if they just i think like zara said if they need like three sensing points might not be worth their investment but depending on what they're trying to measure it's really just about taking a look at what their what their essentially pain points are and then seeing if it's applicable no matter the size of the operation exactly tailings down that's i mean i don't know how many shows we've done on tailings that's a huge it's a huge issue especially once once a couple uh give away and disaster strikes now people pay attention and not and not just the mining community just general populace and as they should um let's talk a little bit about the value again you touched on earlier but let's unpack the value a little bit about on the tailing side sure so with tailings on the tailings side we have been working with hydro research based in sweden for years now even before selexov established the partners the owners were working with hydro research so it started from seepage monitoring through distributed temperature sensing so you put cable within the construction whether it's hydro dam or tailings and you measure temperature across the cable across the entire interior length of the dam continuously around the clock and then you put reference points so seepage and temperature are connected every time there is a significant temperature change uh and there is seasonal variations of temperature the cable picks that up and then that gives you an indication in real time and with very high location accuracy which you know other technology can provide where you have that temperature change and then with hydro research we can also give you the information on the seepage and the flow rate so what is the flow rate and in real time as a simple estimation of it and if there is any rapid changes in it and where exactly it that is so that that started from you know in sweden now lkab and boliden all those sailing stamps are monitored by um by fiber sensing fiber for seepage and then we've also done danbridge so basically as soon as there is any strain on fiber any local failures the fiber can pick it up and that can give you an alert that there there might be an um you know a failure somewhere uh at the end bridge so that's quick alert um on the on the entire you know dam so that's um that's the the key application that's the easier part of it in addition to temperature and seepage we've most recently we've been working with um csprop and doing dash analysis and seismic analysis so we now combine the dash and seismic signals with the temperature signals which temperature gives you more of a kind of near field around the cable changes of seepage and erosion and then with that we can not only do induced seismic monitoring in case there is abnormal seismicity or large seismicity we can also do um we can also do seismic surveys using ambient noise interferometry technique for example and then that allows you to image the entire subsurface of the dam so every time the velocity of the seismic signals change that can indicate that you have internal erosion or fines flowing material changing and that can also indicate that there might be areas of higher seepage or defects cracks fractures and then in addition to that with the dss side of fiber sensing and strain monitoring we can locate any areas that there is settlement deformation and movement in real time and with high location accuracy so now we are integrating all three elements of distributed temperature monitoring distributed seismic monitoring and distributed strain sensing or monitoring into one platform so that gives you opportunities for real-time alerts in case temperature rapidly changes or there is seismic events or there is strain and movement and then we can also have a lot of data for after processing so occasional surveys to image the entire subsurface and see if anything has changed over over a period of weeks or months and on the uh because of the seismic monitoring that also is applicable to the geotechnical side right right and that's so that that's another layer or that's another bucket that you can offer based on the seismic is that right that's correct and uh thanks for pointing that out and um you know one of the um the advantages of celexa has been the ida system and most recently the karina system that we were we got an award for it in terms of innovation the commercial space a couple of months ago so with the karina system and in combination with the constellation engineered fiber that's this alexa invention we have been applying it in the oil and gas and carbon sequestration and geothermal applications that carina and constellation cable it has a very much equivalent or in some cases better performance than the traditional geophone sensors so you get a lot of a height array of you know geophones technically around the cable and you get a hundred times better signal to noise ratio so we have signals that show better quality than geofons and then that fiber can do your seismic monitoring um in real time for you as well you know it's a it's a lot it's a lot of ground to cover um you know and i i just wondered um from your perspective like it must be sort of neat to be at sort of this you know because you've worked you got a lot of experience in the industry now to sort of be able to sort of take this type of technology and enter it into a into a you know into the canadian market and you know you you backed by a company that's done so much research and commercialized their product um what's this sort of been like for you to sort of have that experience of of of being on the forefront of bringing solixa into the canadian mining market and into other markets oh very exciting jared it's very exciting i mean i've been passionate about the mining industry you know since i decided which which degree to pursue whether it's electrical or computer and mining and mining was definitely the one and i'm not regretting it it just went through a lot of like exciting changes and and you know when i was working at the mine sites as i mentioned before it was just constantly installing instrumentations making sure they're working every time you wanted to get to instrumentation underground it was a long time and collect data bring it to surface makes sense that was days by the time you wanted to make sense of the data the time was going to make a decision that you can apply now with the integration of instrumentations bringing data in real time you know digitization a lot of modeling programs and data analysis it's just so exciting because you you talk to the rock mask more directly you understand what it's telling what it's needing what you need to do more quickly to to improve the safety to improve the stability and keep the production going you know so it's uh it's really exciting and then with fiber as i've been learning more about it i kind of regret that i why i didn't know about it a little sooner i would have switched sooners yeah life is that way in a lot of ways isn't it no i it's exciting to learn about it um you know i hope we get to unpack it more i think you know in some of these different industries that you're serving as well i'm sure there's lots of interesting uh topics to cover in the oil and gas side um garth i have to bring you in before we wrap up the interview because there is for sure someone asking um me being one of them is uh what do you do with the data how do you how do you organize it i distribute it um all these is there sort of a suite is there a central system is it integrated into other people's systems what do you do once you're collecting all this it's a great question jared because these things can generate a lot of data you know we spoke about these exciting things you've got 10 kilometers of fiber you measure in every meter along there well that means that you've got 10 000 measurements over there and they could be 10 000 measurements of acoustic strain and temperature so that's three times 10 000 and the acoustics we can do at 10 kilohertz so you know you you've got huge amounts of data and what's important is that you don't overwhelm the customer with that data volume they just wouldn't be able to manage it you'd be looking for the needle in a headstack so what we've been doing we've developed a edge processing platform and the reason we call it the edge platform that sits on the edge of the network it sits right there at where we generate in the data so it's very efficient the high speed network transfers the 10 gig all takes place at the control room in the mine and we use that platform to combine the different data sets so the temperature the acoustics the uh strain will get combined and controlled at that edge platform but it also then strips out the relevant information and it processes and only provides the relevant information to the mine operator so that's a very important offer you know part of it so that you can get the right data at the right time speed of relevance you know when you need that data it's there because you've got this edge processing platform yeah that's uh yeah i mean i'm glad we covered that because because i i think anybody listening is going to go there there is an exceptional amount of data that that's coming through um and it's is it quite uh you probably just explained it but again rudimentary understanding is it does it integrate into other people's system or is a standalone application that they're watching um absolutely yeah i think that integration is key to it yeah um so you know we can talk to the scada system the control system on the mind uh so we've got standard industrial protocols for communicating between our system and the mine system and you know this links very much to what we're talking about uh commercial systems earlier in the talk you know you don't want to be given lots of science type information you want to be given uh information that can be used in the process system and can be integrated into other systems whether it's the uh you know process system for the metering or whether it's the mechanical earth model because you're doing the strain monitoring uh we make sure that that data can be used uh effectively and efficiently in that system uh because it has to integrate with the rest of the mind uh process and data sets yeah yeah you know both you i want i want to thank you for coming on the show it's um it's i just i just love doing these these with this this technical information laying everything out um you know we've had uh i like having people at different positions of every company but when you can technically lay out for the in an operation how your application works it's just it's so interesting um i wish i had a better better memory so i could pack all the stuff that i learned on the show in but i do want to thank you both for coming on the show uh it's licks up for supporting the show and sharing this information um it's great to have you and and i hope we i really do hope we get to do it again sometime thank you thank you it's been a lot of fun yeah all right thank you thank you everybody for watching um if you like mining you you would have loved that interview i think that's a i think that's a safe thing to say they're doing amazing stuff a lot of the research i hope we get slicks to back off for some of the oil and gas i think that'll be another interesting stream to talk about um thank you gowdy for putting everything together she's still working behind the scenes so i'm playing solo today but thank you for watching please subscribe share like comment we have um we just have had so many people suggest guests to us now i mean this our show is really becoming built off of people sharing their network with us we i want to thank you for doing that we really do appreciate it and it just adds so many layers to the show because it's easy to get sort of stuck in your little bubble and sort of just keep building on your small little network but you bringing in people to the show we really appreciate that keep sending us you can subscribe on our youtube linkedin and all our channels just look up crownsmen or mining now check out cim what they're doing it's also on their site if you remember there talk soon see you on the next next episode of mining now

Channel: Crownsmen Partners

Views: 7,453

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 8q7nO0WflkY

Length: 55min 44sec (3344 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021