Hindustan Zinc Ltd.- Rampura Agucha Mines

Stock Piles Measurements with LiDAR SCANNER

A Pile of Bulk materials is called a stockpile. Different areas, like port, refinery, manufacturing facility, etc. uses stockpiles. The stockpile is normally created by a stacker. Stockpiles are normally stacked in stockyards in refineries, ports and mining sites.

Mining Companies calculates volume of stocks to maintain the accounts and evaluates the revenue generated by selling or exporting the material. Earlier, books were updated with the approx. volume of stocks calculated with the measuring tapes. After that integration in measurement technology with laser beam i.e., Total Station was introduced, which was more accurate as compared to measuring tapes. Now with the latest technology i.e., Laser Scanning Technology which reduces the efforts of using total station & calculates volume of stockpiles with more accuracy, has taken over the place of total station.

The major problem is the top view of stockpiles. As the shape of stockpile is not uniform and heights of stockpile is quite high, which is not visible so the laser beams cannot reach there. Solution to this problem is using poles or a trolley based system for increasing the height of scanner to scan from above but if the stockpiles are undershed then walkways above the stockpiles can be used to scan with handheld laser scanners.

After the scanning with laser scanner, the point registration is to be done in the software, usually provided by the manufacturer and pointcloud data of scan is generated in LiDAR or ASCII file or 3D object file formats. This data is further processed for calculated in a third party software for different calculations like distance, angle, area, volume, etc.

Laser Scanning In Underground Mines

 Extracting the valuable metals and minerals from the earth is what Mining means. Due to mining, problems like deforestation, effect to soil and water contamination, poison to human health. Therefore, Mapping the area of Mining is important, which helps in monitoring the area of excavation before and after mining.

For mapping of underground mines, manual survey takes time, which is not accurate enough. In this case, Laser scanning technology is very much effective because of its high accuracy, timeliness & safety which uses laser beams to measure the position of surface or targeted feature. This technique is used to create 3D surface model of mining area.

Laser Scanning creates 3D spatial data which can be used for diverse range of mining activities, such as:

• Design and construction of mine plant and infrastructure.
• Resources Evaluation.
• Ore body, pit and void volumes for mine planning.
• Pit, bench, pre-strip and spoil surface volumes for auditors.
• Stockpile volumes Calculations for updating records.

During scanning in Underground mines, the major issues a team faces is high temperature & low pressure, which affects the scanning team and laser scanner, because working temperature of almost all laser scanners is 0 to 40 Celsius. Another issues are inaccessible areas where are at far distance and team will be unable to reach. Solution to this problem is to use light weight poles (i.e., Aluminium), placing portable handheld laser scanner on poles and scan.