Mines-In-Time

Mines-In-Time (MIT) is an automatic solution for monitoring in real time the stress alteration of the rock mass during mining operations, to be integrated in a traffic-light Decision Support System (DSS) to avoid risks and cost related to mines collapse.

Benefits

The use of MIT will grant outstanding advantages for end users: 

• Reduction of health and safety risks of personnel involved in underground works and reduction of economic losses due to collapses and failures (in case of accident the operations can be stopped for weeks or months before recovering complete production, with losses of millions €)
• Improvement of planning and scheduling of mining and maintenance operations, saving costs of inspections, analysis and monitoring, estimated in the order of 30% with respect to the current practices.

Customers

Mining companies and service providers.

Technology

MIT is based on a 4 dimensions Local Earthquake Tomography (4D LET) methodology and is able to analyze both natural and induced micro-seismicity due to mining operations. This technique is a unparalleled upgrade of the traditional ambient noise analysis and time lapse 3D LET, since the addition of the 4th dimension (time) allows a real time monitoring of ground deformation related to the stress variation and provides an instant alert in case of risky conditions, using data provided by the existing networks of seismographs already installed in most of the mining sites (no extra hardware to be installed).

  This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020
  research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 875071