Peabody’s North Goonyella mine in Queensland recently joined Yancoal’s Austar mine in New South Wales already using LTCC, with other mines showing with the right seam height showing interest.

Using conventional longwall mining, the North Goonyella mine extracts 4.2m of its target seam.

LTCC is designed for seams higher than 4.5m.

BHP Billiton’s Broadmeadow mine – which is a punch longwall, underground coal mine 190km southwest of Mackay – is expected to transition from a conventional longwall operation to LTCC to increase productivity.

“As a few customers now have longwall top coal caving systems, we have added some additional tags to record the rear caving door ram pressures and movement [in mm] as well as the rear slider ram movement,” LVA said.

All this data is now available on the trending and 3D screens and convergence in the load cycle screen within the LVA software.

If a mine has convergence data available from its longwall, LVA can now read and report on the shield heights H1 (tip) and H3 (rear).

“This allows us to display the difference in heights as well as the closure within cycles. H2 [ram top] will be available soon,” according to LVA.

LVA has been involved in two ACARP projects that recently ended.

The first was ACARP Project C20032 – Dynamic Response of Longwall Systems and their Relationship to Caving Behaviour while the second was ACARP Project C21013 – Improving Roof Control on Longwall Faces Through the Incorporation of Reliable Convergence Monitoring Data into Load Cycle Analysis Software.

“We feel that being involved in these projects has really helped our understanding of longwalls and has also helped to improve the data we can provide the customer,” LVA said.