Black Rock Mine Operation relies on iRoc
Black Rock Mine Operation relies on iRoc
Black Rock Mine Operations (BRMO) is a prominent manganese and iron ore mine located in the Northern Cape region of South Africa. Situated approximately 80km northwest of Kuruman in the Kalahari Desert, BRMO encompasses three separate shafts. The mining operation yields an annual output of 3.6 million tons of iron and manganese ore across these three distinct shafts, which were monitored across multiple control rooms.
BRMO operated in a highly decentralised manner, with each shaft independently managing its operations. This approach posed challenges in terms of overseeing and coordinating activities across the entire value chain using the sources from there various SCADA, OMI, CCTV, and historian data. To enhance operational efficiency and gain a comprehensive view of its mining operations, BRMO needed a centralised control room solution. Organisers worked with Jaco van Heerden and Oculus Operational Innovations, a company that specialises in designing complete control room and visualisation solutions for mission critical environments, to create a solution that would allow it to monitor and control all aspects of mining activities from one central location and with a high degree of flexibility.
Oculus designed and facilitated a solution proposed by van Heerden, known as the Integrated Remote Operations Centre (iRoc). iRoc is designed not only to replace and upgrade BRMO's existing infrastructure with a centralised monitoring and control system, it also would accommodate future needs.
At the heart of the iRoc is a horseshoe-shaped videowall consisting of 21 operator stations. The videowall incorporates a total of 84 49-inch Prospectre screens for the main display and an additional 84 24-inch screens for the operators' individual displays. This setup provides operators with an expansive surface for viewing and managing all the pertinent information related to the mining operation. Driving the video wall and stations is VuWall’s video wall control room solution, TRx centralised video wall management platform. TRx is a platform that combines AV-over-IP distribution, multivideo wall control and KVM management.
The implementation of the iRoc solution, leveraging VuWall's TRx central management system and VuStream 510 appliances, is said to have brought about significant improvements for BRMO. By centralising operations, BRMO gained a holistic view of its entire value chain, enabling proactive decision-making instead of reactive responses. This offered BRMO the flexibility to extend, switch and composite real-time signals. This further enhanced the operational efficiency and productivity of the mining operation. The large videowall surface and individual operator displays empowered operators to monitor and control all relevant information related to the mining operations from a single central point.
In addition, the iRoc solution earned many notable distinctions: It is said to be the longest continuous TBC SmartTrac operator console built to date and the largest SDVoE AV-over-IP video wall installation in an industrial environment.