The concept and technology for the 3D Longwall Monitoring software grew from over more than a decade of 3D rendering and modeling research and development by 3D Software. Recently the technology was successfuly used in the finance industry to visualise stock market activity. This application allows stock brokers to make quick and accurate decisions based on large volumes of real-time data. Now, through its links with specialist industrial software developer, Ci Technologies, 3D Software Development applied the technology to longwall monitoring.
The 3D Longwall Monitoring software is a real time and historical data visualisation tool. It assists the user by providing a quick, intuitive and comparative view and assessment of the data, according to the company. The control is easy to use, reliable, accurate and high performance suitable for critical applications.
The company said the software is aimed at providing easy, accurate and instant assessment of longwall data. The analysis can be done in real-time or using historical data logs.
3D director, Pawel Achtel, said the monitoring system could be customised to fit to any data server. By December, the interface between Citect systems and the monitoring systems is expected to be fully commercially available.
The product is being made available initially through Ci Technologies and can also be retrofitted to existing Citect systems. Ci Technologies’ marketing communications manager, Stephen Flannigan, said longwall mines interested in trialing the product were encouraged to express interest and should contact him at stephenflannigan@cit.com.au.
Some features include:
- Historical snapshots can be accumulated on the client saving bandwidth for real-time use
- Easy and intuitive 3D rotations (scroll bars), movement (click and drag) and scaling (mouse wheel)
- High Performance: the control can sustain several hundred updates a second on an average PC.
- Direct cursor selection in 3D is intuitive and precise (enable tool tips and hover mouse cursor over bars)
- Configurable periodic sampling and/or manual data capture automatic (in fixed time intervals) or/and manual data capture
- Extensive labeling options aid clarity and rich information display
- Drag and Drop of historical log files (CSV)
- 3D Gridlines assist data interpretation
- Visual Basic friendly COM interface
- "Zero based" or "Range" automatic scaling
-Easy to read axis labels
- Quick, easy and accurate inspection of individual values out of hundreds of other data points via "surfing" the 3D graph.
- Colour coded bars give additional visual feedback
- Adoptive labeling and scaling gives clear, readable view
