MINING TECHNOLOGY Master Drilling unveils powerful new borer

Master Drilling, an innovative mining services company, will begin trial work on a mobile boring machine that could revolutionise the way horizontal tunnels are dug in mines, accessing ore bodies more quickly and safely and bringing marginal deposits into play.

The tracked, modular machine can bore 5.5m- to 8m-wide holes into hard rock, with the expectation that it will be three or four times faster than traditional drilling and blasting methods, able to work around the clock with a crew of just three people per shift as it advances up to 6m per day.

Using traditional drilling and blasting methods, the advance was 40m to 60m a month.

Master Drilling has a history of unveiling new technologies or concepts at the annual African Mining Indaba in Cape Town and 2018 was no different, with a throng of delegates gathered around a model of the machine and an animated video of how it will work when it is tested in a South African diamond mine in the fourth quarter of 2018.

As vertical tunnels comprised just 5% of a mine and horizontal tunnels the remainder, there was a clear business incentive to develop equipment that could develop the lateral tunnels safely, quickly and cost effectively with a continuous process, said Koos Jordaan, technical director at JSE-listed Master Drilling, which has drills turning in 20 countries.

Master Drilling worked with Italian tunnelling specialist company Seli Technologies in developing the horizontal borer, but the intellectual property and international patents reside with Master Drilling.

The machine could be deployed at the Venetia diamond mine owned by De Beers, which is investing $2bn in developing an underground mine at its opencast operation.

The system could be used in the bottom of one of the mine’s pits to drill into a side wall to test its efficacy.

The boring machine can dip or lift by 12 degrees, extending its utility underground from being a pure horizontal machine to developing access tunnels to reach ore bodies from shafts.

The operators of the machine operate behind a rotating drilling head almost three times the height of a grown man, with thick metal shields over their heads and at the sides of the machine with special access points to pin steel nets to the sides and top of the tunnel.

Master Drilling was looking for ways to operate remotely as many of the machine’s functions as possible, allowing for operators on the surface of the mine to control aspects of its work.

Jordaan was reluctant to give a cost to build the machine and declined to speak about the cost benefits the machine would give a mining company compared with traditional drilling and blasting, citing the early stage of proving the technology and not wanting to give competitors too much information.

In the test work starting later in 2018, Master Drilling will take all the risk, paying to prove the concept.