Fiber Optic based System for 24/7 Asset Monitoring

Conveyor belts and pipelines have been used widely in the mining and O&G industry for over 200 years to handle bulk materials and consists of various components. The malfunction of one component may lead to significant downtime in production if it causes the shutdown of the system. Engineers spend considerable time and effort to monitor and maintain the conveyor systems using thermal or acoustic handheld devices. But these are subject to human error, are time and cost intensive. An advanced intelligent monitoring and operational control system is required to overcome the defects in the current system; however, there are two major barriers to such an upgrade.

First, collecting up-to-date data from these long assets which are highly distributed over a large and second, the transmission, analysis, and interpretation of all the collected data is also challenging, not to mention exposing technicians to hazardous environments. Use of fiber optic cables as a sensor presents a case to overcome all of above constraints and provide a reliable and low cost monitoring system for early detection of faults with conveyor belts and pipelines. Such a system significantly improves operational safety and reduce the interruption to production of conveyor belts in underground coal mines by delivering the following benefits:
• providing real-time, reliable, robust, intrinsically safe and continuous temperature measurements for heavy-duty conveyor belt components
• detecting the mechanical failure of conveyor belt components at an early stage • reducing the labour time and cost of conveyor belt monitoring
• preventing catastrophic failures of conveyor belts
• presenting operators with useful information on conveyor belt conditions
• measuring conveyor belt surrounding temperature profiles