Kalgoorlie Gold Processing Facility

Ackcio Beam was used to acquire and transmit data from sensors monitoring a tailings dam for a gold processing facility in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.

Tailings dams have been used for centuries as an effective disposal method for mining waste. As such, they are megastructures that occupy a large land area. They are also fragile as their industrial design and function make them vulnerable to heavy rain, weakening foundations, and tailings liquefaction. Hence, monitoring their stability and structural integrity is critical to maintaining safety and minimizing risks.

For their tailings dam in Kalgoorlie, our client installed piezometers to monitor pore water pressure. Originally manually monitored, this task proved to be both costly and impractical due to the infrequency of readings, the dam’s remote location and vast land area.

Instead, the client opted to use Ackcio Beam. 11 Ackcio Vibrating Wire 1-Sensor Nodes were deployed to transmit readings from the Piezometers to the Ackcio Gateway every 30 minutes.

With that running so well, the client further installed two in-place inclinometers to monitor the embankment deformation of the dam in the later phase of the project. The inclinometers monitoring required two Ackcio Digital Nodes, one per inclinometer. Ackcio Beam’s highly scalable system allowed these new Nodes to transmit their data to the same Gateway.

Using Ackcio Beam, real-time readings were obtained from a robust and reliable wireless monitoring system. This, in turn, led to increased awareness of the dam’s stability and alleviated the high labour costs of manual monitoring for a large geographical area.

Moreover, the flexibility and scalability of the system made it easy to expand the monitoring network by adding digital nodes for MEMS, in-place inclinometer sensor chains, seamlessly integrating into the existing Ackcio system.