In-Seam Drill Monitoring (Stage 3)

This report documents the work conducted during Stage 3 of an ACARP project entitled ‘In-seam Drill Monitoring’. This project is part of an integrated in-seam drilling research program that aims to increase the effectiveness of underground drilling operations. BHP has conducted this final stage of the work.

The key benefit of the technique is through improving the reliability of information on geology, particularly structures, used in outburst risk management. The data is available without adding delays to the production process - ie. no additional holes are drilled, and the data can be evaluated immediately following drill hole completion. The technique can be applied to any rotary drill rig with only modest costs for modification and installation of the transducers (approximately $15,000 for retro-fitting to one drill rig considered). The transducers and associated cabling is robust and reliable, as evidenced by its performance over the three years of active life of the prototype drill.

The project has two major components:

• The construction of a drill monitoring system for recording parameters associate with drilling, including development of procedures to interpret the drill data to provide a better basis for outburst risk assessments in structured areas.
• The development of intrinsically safe computing hardware and software to integrate the drill monitoring data with any available hole survey data.
  

Our previous work produced and demonstrated the drill monitoring system through nearly 2km of drilling. Correlation with geological data after mining demonstrated that the data can be used to improve the identification of a wide range of intersected geological structures. Of particular importance was the ability to isolate key data from an area that subsequently outburst, providing a means to improve the risk assessment of such areas, but only if drill monitoring data was collected.

This final stage of the project aimed to:

• provide a platform for integration of drill hole survey data and drill monitor data, enabling elimination of ambiguity in the position of geological structures. The tendency for rotary in-seam holes to deviate make this a critical capability for the effectiveness of the technology.
• streamline the data processing and storage functions, to remove barriers to user acceptance of the technology. Past experience with drill monitoring systems indicated that the quantity of data and difficult interpretation procedures were major potential barriers to the long term acceptance of the technique.

The project has produced a windows based software package for routine collection and processing of in-seam drill monitoring data and for integration of drill survey data. The streamlining of the processing function alone is estimated to have removed over 75% of the time for processing required by the prototype version of the system.