Finding qualified equipment operators is hard enough for most mining companies, and the extreme weather, punishing conditions, and oxygen-deprived air of the Tibetan mountains combine to make finding operators even tougher for the operators if this high-altitude copper mine – but SANY thinks they have a solution: fully self-driving haul trucks.
Chinese equipment brand SANY has deployed fully 60 of its 70-tonne (~80 ton) payload-rated SKT105ED battery electric haul trucks at the Zhibula Copper Mine in Tibet. Operated by Zijin Minig and Tibet Julong Copper, the mine functions at a dizzying 17,700 foot elevation in a region of the Gangdese Mountains known as the Kailas Range, and the conditions there would challenge the health and safety of even the toughest and fittest operators.
“High-altitude illness becomes increasingly relevant above 2,500 meters,” explains Eacon, in one section of a published paper. “Research involving workers in Andes mines operating between 3,800 and 4,500 meters found that 73% of workers assessed experienced periods of nocturnal oxygen saturation below 85% during their high-altitude shifts, indicating moderate-to-severe hypoxemia.”
That’s bad news for Zijin’s workers – but the good news here, of course, is that the company won’t be needing many heavy haul drivers going forward.
Eacon conducts the ORCASTRA
SANY has been working with Perth, Australia-based Eacon Mining Technology to develop an autonomous haulage solution that uses a full suite of both in-vehicle and ground-based sensors, adaptive vehicle controls, and machine learning that can handle the big bad trucks even here in the Kailas range.
“Autonomous haulage offers one way to address this challenge,” continues the Econ report. “Rather than requiring a driver for each truck, autonomous systems allow fleets to be managed through centralized supervision, with personnel overseeing operations and intervening when required. This reduces the need for people to spend entire shifts operating equipment at elevation, while changing how workforce resources are allocated across the mine … depending on the system configuration, some operations can manage autonomous fleets from remote Integrated Operations Centers located away from the mine site, (allowing) personnel to supervise haulage activities from lower-altitude locations, further reducing the need for workers to remain in extreme-altitude environments.”
The working partnership between the two companies combines SANY’s battery-powered truck platform with Eacon’s full technology stack to create dependable, driverless haul trucks with logic and behaviors that are ideally suited to China’s open-pit mining environments.
Eacon technology is currently operating more than 3,100 autonomous trucks cross more than 40 large-scale mines, including Zijin Mining’s Zijinshan Gold-Copper Mine and at the Norton Gold Fields project in Australia.
SANY SKT105ED
While specifications for this specific deployment weren’t disclosed, the SANY SKT105E trucks (the “D” is, presumably, the wide-body variant) the company has deployed elsewhere are powered by a dual-motor electric drivetrain, pairing two permanent-magnet synchronous motors with a dual three-speed automated manual transmission. The system delivers 570 kW (~765 hp) of continuous power and up to 820 kW (~1,100 hp) at peak output, with each motor producing some 2,430 Nm (~18,00 lb-ft) of peak torque.
Those motors get their electrons from an absolute whopper of a lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery pack in capacities ranging from 423 to 642 kWh, depending on configuration. The big trucks also offer regenerative braking to recover energy on downhill runs, while their fast-charging system can reportedly charge the battery from 20% to 90% in under an hour.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Eacon; via The Driven.
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