Published in American Longwall Magazine
All mines understand the difficulties of tracking the condition of long belts where certain types of damage can be hard to detect by visual inspection alone. There are rip detection systems available which use inductive loops to detect rip formation, but the loops may fail through impact and flex damage and do not provide continuous belt condition monitoring.
The introduction of EyeQ allows the gathering of real-time information about complete belt health, which has not been available with previous belt monitoring systems. The difference lies in EyeQ’s ability to discover all types of steel cord damage, as it occurs, in addition to detecting rips.
Rather than being inductive, EyeQ operates on magnetic principles and scans the steel cords and rip detection panels for changes to magnetic properties.
The rip detection panels, which are incorporated within the belt body, can be inserted on site or during belt manufacture. They consist of closely pitched, high elongation steel cords placed across the belt at an angle. Besides acting as a physical barrier to contain damage between panels, they activate the conveyor stop sequence in the event of a longitudinal rip.
When EyeQ is initially installed it runs a ‘signature profile’ of the complete belt length. This is then used as the benchmark against which every future belt cycle is measured.
The system consists of three main components; a magnetizer, sensor and encoder. The magnetizer lightly magnetizes the cords within the belt and rip detection panels. The slightest change to the magnetic signature of the cords triggers an alarm. The sensor gathers the data and analyzes every new incident. Changes to the signature profile are displayed and assigned a rating of 1-5, depending on severity. The encoder establishes a date, time and position reference.
Because cord damage is ranked, users can elect to allow minor damage to pass until it registers at a more serious level, or take immediate preventive action. However, any change to a rip detection panel stops the belt.
Three EyeQ systems have already been placed in the US, with a fourth on order. About 20 more systems are working in European mines.
Fenner Dunlop said it would fully support the EyeQ system in the North American market.
