Project Background
Historically remote monitoring networks have been extremely labour intensive to maintain. Battery changes, physical data downloads and the extensive travel & fieldwork that goes along with the multitude of sites needed for good quality, accurate groundwater level monitoring. In order to optimise efficiency and eliminate associated safety risks (driving, fatigue, heat stress) a customer in the central region of the Northern Territory (NT) requested upgrade of groundwater level monitoring devices around the environmental impact area of mining operations. This included close to 100 monitoring bore upgrades with satellite telemetry necessary due to the remote nature of monitoring locations.
In addition to this the conditions in the NT are temperature extreme (+40 degrees Celsius) with some locations up to several hours travel and in off-road, hard to reach places.
Solutions
Eliminating, or at least minimising travel to remote monitoring locations was integral and the purpose built ‘EWS Well-Cap’ has been specifically developed for these exact harsh environmental conditions. With Well-Cap housings made from robust, UV Stabilised & glass filled material they are perfect for long-term, heat resistant applications in harsh conditions. Additionally, their simple design and ease-of-use meant that a large portion of devices could be installed by on-site environmental staff.
Associated data conversions and calibrations were then simply updated within the Orion iO dashboard which displayed all real-time groundwater level data and also provided the ability for trigger alarm levels to be specified. This meant that mine site operations could monitor aquifer levels and ensure critical depths aren’t reached to ensure overall environmental compliance.
Outcomes & Benefits
All Iridium certified Well-Cap devices were easily installed both by EWS technicians and mine site environmental staff. The simple to install devices required only an allen-key and the free SwitchComm mobile app with all remote sites no longer required to be regularly visited by mine site staff. This has been a great ‘Value-Add’ for mine site operations both from a safety perspective and efficiency, cost drive.
With the EWS Well-Cap adapters devices can be easily fitted to any size groundwater monitoring bore (50mm, 100mm, +300mm, etc) and with all equipment being manufactured in-house (Perth, WA) supply chains and demands are not a concern. The innovative, low impact design also means that compliance groundwater sampling can still be easily achieved and the environmental footprint of installs is very minimal (low voltage solar panels, 12V rechargeable batteries)
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