Recently, at the Qidashan Iron Mine Intelligent Management and Control Center of Anshan Iron and Steel Mining, Hou Dawei, the dispatch chief of shift B, watched the rising operating efficiency data of drilling rigs, electric shovels, and trucks on the screen, and couldn’t hide his excitement.
“The efficiency of the entire process of drilling, mining and transportation has been improved, which marks the success of Anshan Iron and Steel Mining’s digital intelligent mining at Qidashan Iron Mine, and mining has truly entered the era of intelligence…”
From once “relying on people” to today’s “relying on intelligence”, during the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, Ansteel Resources’ excellent answers to intelligent development successfully solved many pain points that plagued the improvement of traditional mining operation efficiency and maximized the utilization of domestic lean iron ore resources.
In today’s mines, the entire process of exposure, well, selection, and ball processing has become intelligent. What once seemed an impossible task has been widely used in the entire production chain of Anshan Iron and Steel Resources, and has even affected the entire mining industry.
At the beginning of the “14th Five-Year Plan”, as the most resource-advantaged enterprise in China, Ansteel Resources is facing unprecedented impacts and challenges: the development of traditional open-pit mines faces the industry pain points of “unclear geology, inaccurate ore distribution, and disconnected mining and selection”; due to factors such as scale, technology, and efficiency, underground mines are facing many challenges such as declining output and rising rigid costs…
How to deal with challenges?
Ansteel Resources clearly realizes that in the context of the accelerated restructuring of global industrial and supply chains, the top priority is to rely on intelligence to solve problems.
Focusing on the strategic goal of building a world-class resource development enterprise, carrying out bold disruptive innovations and empowering enterprises with high-quality development with first-class intelligent manufacturing is the key to solving the bottleneck problem in the mining industry.
In accordance with the requirements of Ansteel Group’s “Digital Ansteel Construction Work Plan”, Ansteel Resources takes the reshaping of the traditional mining development form as the entry point, closely follows the main line of “industrial digitization and digital industrialization”, and uses advanced information technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence to strive to actively perceive mining production and operations.
Independently coordinate and optimize various resources to form a smart mining solution that “integrates an integrated platform to create a mining ecology, uses information technology to serve enterprise transformation, highlights industry characteristics to form a mining model, and implements intelligent manufacturing to demonstrate a demonstration role.” It uses first-class intelligent manufacturing to promote the deep integration of informatization and traditional mining production links, leading the transformation and upgrading of the mining industry.
Walking into the magnet grinding workshop of Ansteel Mining Guanbaoshan Company, it is clean and quiet. Two large ball mills are running quickly. The huge production site is empty. The occasional flashing lights of the intelligent inspection robot and cleaning robot show that the operation is in progress.
Starting in 2021, Ansteel Resources will build the country’s first smart factory in the company, reengineering the production process with intelligent means, promoting the transformation of the mineral processing process from manual regulation to system regulation, and making the mineral processing processes such as grinding, magnetic separation, and flotation coordinated, smart production, and intelligent manufacturing.
At the same time, Angang Mining’s Qidashan Iron Mine, Asia’s largest iron mine, has also built the country’s first full-process digital mining system.
The “three-level linkage” mechanism of digital modeling of geological resources, dynamic optimization of intelligent ore allocation, and collaborative intelligent control of production integrates scattered geological data, production data, and mineral processing data to achieve a fundamental transformation from “experience judgment” to “data decision-making” in resource development.
Ansteel Mining’s Yanshanshan Iron Mine relies on the framework system of “one center, one network, one system, one platform + N intelligent applications” to build an unmanned mining demonstration area, realize surface operation of mining equipment with efficient and intelligent underground mines, and lead the industry’s production reform.
After the transformation, the number of people working underground has been reduced by 120, and the labor productivity has been improved to the third place among metallurgical mining units.
Sensor networks, virtual reality and simulation, precise positioning and navigation… these novel and unfamiliar words have become the “main force” for Ansteel Resources to accelerate the development of intelligence.
During the “14th Five-Year Plan” period, Ansteel Resources integrated “ore flow”, “information flow”, “business flow” and “data flow”, and took the lead in the domestic mining industry to complete the unmanned transformation of the four major scenarios of exposure, well, selection and ball. It established a “digital intelligent management and control center” that integrates six types of dispatching, including production, equipment and safety, and realized a complete “mine planning-site”
The whole process of “quality modeling – mining plan – mining operation – transportation operation – mineral processing – pelletization/sintering” is highly integrated, intelligent, flat and digitally managed. This has not only become an intelligent benchmark for the metallurgical mining industry, leading the overall transformation and upgrading of the mining industry, but also marks the new journey of smart factories from single-point automation to global intelligence.
