The system enables accurate and reliable detection of vehicles, personnel or fixed plant with programmable distances up to 100m, providing a total OEM equipment solution for proximity detection and collision avoidance, Becker chief executive Tony Napier told ILN.

“The underground coal industry has not had a solution until now. For the past few years the coal industry was unable to act given the lack of certified product and the emphasis on surface solutions by most vendors,” he said.

“This solution has been designed from the start for underground coal and hence is intrinsically safe. Being developed primarily for underground mines, the system also provides the best performance in this unique environment.”

The system supports vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-operator and operator-to-vehicle interactions.

The certification covers Becker’s fourth generation collision avoidance system equipment offering and includes electromagnetic near field, UHF RFID and time-of-flight radar antennas used for inner, middle, outer zone detection and distance measurement.

The certification is for Ex ia M1 applications and was assessed and approved by SIRA in the United Kingdom. The IECEx certification will be independently reviewed locally to comply with Queensland requirements.

The combination of the detection technologies addressed the common issues confronting personnel safety around mobile plant, Napier said.

Standard features include self-diagnostics for any component failure with operator alert, component interrogation for system troubleshooting, voice and LED annunciation, stores tag transactions history on board and is plug and play via mil-spec standard connectors for fast installation and component replacement.

“The CAS solution provides exceptional coverage and detection options,” Napier told ILN.

“The combination of the detection technologies overcomes the inherent physical limitations of roof height, ribs, meshing and so forth, systems designed for surface fail in this area,” he said.

“The Becker system is not just a proximity detection solution for a continuous miner.

“We can cover that equipment but we can also cover higher speed vehicle-to-vehicle interactions, we can provide critical feedback to miners and operators, we can identify and flag hazardous areas, and the system can be standalone or integrated with our other tagging and communications technologies.”