Throughput Technologies recently supplied a number of Westermo LR-11 Lonworks Fiber Routers to Sperosens. Sperosens is a Pretoria-based company who supplies telemetry equipment to the mining industry. It used Westermo's Lonworks Optical Fiber converter equipment to create a 10 km optical fibre backbone to remotely monitor the operation of continuous coal miner machines.
The Sperosens product known as MMA200, monitors operational status and production efficiency of a continuous miner machine while in operation. The data is extracted from a machine via the machine's 1000 V trailing power cable using Lonworks power-line communications technology. The Lonworks communications data is then converted by a Westermo LR-11 Lonworks Router to join a fibre communications backbone.
At a colliery in Mpumalanga Province, two separate continuous miner machines are presently feeding data to surface using a 10 km single mode fibre-optic backbone. On surface another LR-11 router from Westermo converts the optical data back to Lonworks format which is connected to the server PC.
The system is in operation at present, and the ability to monitor the operational availability of the continuous miners have already resulted in substantial productivity improvement at the mine.
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