Inco’s telecommunications’ provide a competitive edge

If the struggle for market share in the nickel market was to be characterized as a horse race, the bookies wouldn’t have much of a problem picking the winner.

Reading from the form sheet, the Russian entry, Norilsk, would have an unbeatable bloodline grading 2-4% nickel and a lightweight jockey with a wage of $120 per month. The Canadian entry, Sudbury, would barely make the lists — a low-grade bloodline at about 1.5% nickel and a heavyweight jockey with a wage not far off $3,500 per month.

Fortunately for Sudbury, the struggle is not a horse race and despite the form sheets, the Canadian nickel industry has a better-than-fighting chance. The reason? Canada is recognized the world over as a leader in telecommunications as well as in mining technology.

Inco (TSE), already a capable miner (and metallurgist and marketer), has grasped telecommunications technology and is now in the process of aggressively uniting the two to create the essential structure for the automated mine of the future.

Some of the early expressions of this effort are already performing at Inco’s Copper Cliff North and Little Stobie mines near Sudbury, Ont. At Copper Cliff North, an operator manipulates, from a location on surface, an underground load-haul-dump vehicle through all the functions required of it: tramming the machine to the drawpoint, loading and returning to the ore pass, all by remote control.

Currently, the operator is a mile away from the machine but there is no reason he may not be five miles away or more.

At Little Stobie, a 70-ton electro-hydraulic truck hauls a distance of 1,680 ft. from a remote-controlled chute, dumping automatically at the ore pass. The remote-control system for the truck is underground at present and the system has delivered 240,000 tons in its first eight months of trial. The truck itself was designed from the road up by the company’s engineers. As noted, these two haulage systems are no more than the first steps on the long and intricate road to full automation. They demonstrate to the non-specialist that the communications system Inco has been experimenting with for the last five years not only works but works well in the difficult underground environment.

The major hurdles in underground communication are that radiowaves capable of carrying a voice signal cannot penetrate rock, nor can they go around corners. During the past 15 years, these problems have been overcome by using a specialized radio antenna that can be carried through the workings wherever it may be needed. Inco’s breakthrough has been to expand the application of this system so that it is not only capable of carrying 2-way radio but also computerized data and video.

According to Greg Baiden, Inco’s superintendent of automation and robotics, “the new system has 2,000 times the capability of presently available communications hardware at little more than 1.5 times the cost.” Baiden’s work has been seminal; his doctoral thesis is the basis for Inco’s current research in communications.

Inco is researching other fields. Work is believed to be continuing in hard rock tunnelling/continuous mining equipment and in revolutionary drilling procedures. Little is known concerning these areas because, first, part of the research is being carried out in conjunction with others (including HDRK Research Ltd., a joint Inco-Noranda company), and, second, there is every probability the new technology will be commercialized.

Already, Continuous Mining Systems, an Inco subsidiary, and Ainsworth Electric have formed Advanced Mining Systems to market the new communications technology and clearly there is a lot more to come.