 Welcome everybody to our latest webinar, I'm Richard Campbell and today we're joined by Matt Saunders from UniData and we will be presenting on Minesight and Quarry operational support retrofitting of telelimited groundwater systems. So the core theme today is groundwater monitoring using telelimited systems in Minesight. So here's the team that's involved. We've got Michelle who's our general manager helping at the back end. So if the presentation stops Michelle will get us back online myself speaking at the moment and Matthew Saunders who's the general manager of UniData and very very experienced in telemetry systems. Just before we get going if you want to raise any questions during this webinar please see on this slide where you can push to do that. Push that Q&A button there and it will allow you to ask questions. We will then respond to those questions either as part of this webinar or if the question is a bit too difficult we will come back to you and respond later. Hopefully we can field at your questions today. Why is Hydrotera running these webinar series? Well there's a few reasons but obviously we want to raise awareness in the industry of what we can do to help you and really we see ourselves as integrators of technology and we work in with our technology partners to create bespoke solutions for our customers. We also see this is valuable training to our customers in what technology can do for you and we like to get feedback from yourselves on what industry is really needing to do. Obviously we have a pretty good feel from that from our customers but there's always the next challenge around the corner so we would love to hear about that as well. Okay so what are we covering today? Well we've covered part one in terms of how you can raise questions and who's presenting. Part two is really a technical presentation and we're going to cover a bit from myself in terms of our design process and then a presentation from that largely focusing on telemetry aspects and then we're going to switch to a couple of case studies of large mine site monitoring networks connected up to various groundwater sensing devices. Then part three we'll have question and answers so my session will last for about another eight minutes, Matt's will last for about 15 minutes and then we will move to those other components. So what does Hydrotera do in the world of groundwater monitoring telemetry networks? Well this slide here which at first look is somewhat complex really covers what we do on a day-to-day basis designing bespoke monitoring. So on the left we can have data coming in from multiple sources and in the case of today we're focused on sensor networks coming in but these sensor networks often go via a cloud these days and then we pull the data back in so these there's a number of elements in any monitoring system. We've created integrated systems with all these elements on various projects it's worth understanding that a monitoring system these days can be as complex or as simple as it needs to be to give you the data you need. The second box from the left sort of highlights the complexity of the different choices we have in terms of the telemetry transfer of the data and Matt's going to cover off on components of that today. Choosing which type of telemetry involves understanding the capability of the technology and the ongoing charges telcos do charge so you need to look at the lifetime costs of these systems as well as the hardware costs because often there's a sting in the tail but you also need to look at where you've got coverage. Once you've got the data you know flying via telemetry in the end you have to receive that data and you need to be able to oversight the system this is an area that HydroTerra's invested a lot in in our data stream systems to be able to remotely oversight our clients networks to make sure they're working properly receiving the data in the way that they've been designed so ultimately we can have a quality assured system with known provenance of data and that's what we've really set as a key goal for our companies to be able to provide those systems. We offer a remote oversight service and this is an example of the code cover which we just thought we'd put in there so you know about this service the ongoing operation of these systems is significant and we receive a lot of calls people trying to troubleshoot their systems etc so we've developed a service to provide you with assistance now obviously there's a lot of detail on this slide but this is a subset of a system that we've installed just to give you a feeling for the complexity of systems and why having good oversight of them and having automated routines for oversight and alarms becomes imperative you have so many different combinations of pathways of data coming in that troubleshooting can become complex unless you have a good design process and an oversight process so that's what HydroTerror offers we help to design these systems we work in with our technology partners like Unidata and together we produce good outcomes. Now I'd like to introduce Unidata that's a great success story Unidata are in they've originally an Australian company here can I interrupt you for a moment please looks like they cannot hear you Matt can you hear I can hear okay yes someone else can hear good anyone else it's so good so if you one can hear please guys check your audio settings but in any way we are recording okay the webinar we are going to send a link for those that missed the start part okay sorry Richard please. Thanks Michelle okay well to those to those who you can hear me that's good news so we've been working with Unidata over pretty much since we commenced work 15 years ago they're a great company based here in Australia owned by the New Zealand government which gives them a fair degree of well not completely by the Australian government it's certainly sorry by the New Zealand government but certainly a fair bit and we've found them a great partner to work with they do offer a wide range of products in the telemetry space which Matt's about to talk to our relationship is based on doing great projects together and where one of their distributors in Australia so I would now like to hand over to Matt okay thank you hello this is Matt and good afternoon to everybody just waiting for a air screen from Michelle I think you're meant to share that I am doing that as we speak okay now I'm just the only problem you said I just have to get the brief start of the slides sorry for the delay participants and away we go and my name is Matt and this section of the webinar is really a tutorial and we can't go through absolutely everything but my objective is for you guys to go away with some better broad knowledge of remotely monitoring groundwater as if you ask the next we need to consider with telemetry IRT costs are decreasing and site costs are increasing and site health and safety requirements are increasing substantially groundwater monitoring remotely is now the best option 25 years ago people used to go out in the youth to check stuff now they can't do that they've got to go if it's a long way they've got to have a safety person with them so it's very expensive to visit sites these days so anything you can do remotely is a big deal let's talk about the options or the components we have you know groundwater telemetry project number one you have an instrument to measure the parameters that's obvious number two a data logger to record number three a communication system and for a central computer and we'll just be over doing those particular parameters today in particular the communication system this is just an example of a pressure transmitter you've obviously got to have an instrument and I would just remind people to see that such sensors like this will either have a 40 to 20 milliamp analog oops sorry a 40 to 20 milliamp analog input or a 0 to 5 volt sdi 12 digital or mod bus all of these are relatively easy to handle right or most data loggers can do all of those so it's not that complicated now as Richard said we've got a large range of uh neon loggers essentially the same architecture at the western different packaging sizing this one is a nice one that you actually put inside a ball case you can see it's very very small and here you can see it can be many if you notice how it can go inside a relatively small ball case that's pretty good for security some customers like to have it inside the ball case it's a bit small in there but at least you stop um vandals and think people sort of causing a problem with it uh we have our next modeler uh also just by the way this one inside the ball case you can see this is the logger part of it and you'll note the two batteries and we never eat battery extender now that means that if the two lithium batteries uh it's good to two to five years if you extend it another extender battery it's good to five or ten years battery life of course is depends on the login communication schedule and external power can be used but it's quite a big deal have to be able to put a a borehole logger in and expect you know five years maybe ten years of battery that really exceeds the design life because in ten years there'll be a different way of doing it but that's all inside the ball case we've got another one and this is an example of another customer we have who don't like it inside the ball case they want to see it uh to this little stainless steel clamp they want to clamp it on the side of the ball case and put the logger inside there and that's a that's a mining company they say they don't have any vandals that like it to be easily accessible uh they don't want to have stuff extra stuff in the ball case so that's a good example you'll note here that this one has a baby square antenna and that's an iridium satellite antenna out of interest so they're there to do models um we also have much larger systems this is an example of a larger system and uh Richard and I can talk about later this has got a bubble bubbler instrument and the global star satellite for a variety of reasons that was best for the customer and you'll see here's got a bubbler there's a pump here so there's a lot of going on in that little box they're there for the enclosure is quite big and this is the same customer that has a uh same arrangement no bubbler and here you have a cell phone based in the unlogger so there's more space in the enclosure so uh the enclosure we just we we worked with hydro tarant used it appropriate closure for the for the job at hand but if you have complicated things like bubbles then obviously you're going to have more space needed and this is the uh overall neon remote logger architecture i wanted to briefly talk about that uh and this is where we have process signals sensors and the like coming into a logger and then we also have a communicator on the other side so these logging and communication functions carry on independently and that's a big deal because uh if for some reason start again back again sorry if for some reason this cannot get onto the server to send us data it could be a hundred reasons why it could be that servers down the comms channel broken or everyone available there's some problem this communicator tends to send the data and if it can't do it it just stores it and then sends the next schedule columns so the logger part continues working and the communicator gets drug where it needs to be and that's uh that's also a big deal architecturally because um you don't want to send data to a server that's not listening because then you have uh you have a problem and uh a uh and aside to this was we saw lots of these uh uh into the Royal Irrigation Department in Thailand and to give you an idea in there they had they had many of them uh 1000 plus and uh their government IP uh arrangements their internet erasers were changed and they lost their IP number so all of these loggers in the field uh tried every 15 ministers to send their data and they couldn't do it uh and uh it took them three weeks to get restore their IP number uh and uh loggers in the field as soon as the IP number came back again it then it then downloaded all the data and that there were no data loss really you never know what's going to happen you need to be resilient right and don't expect the comms and the servers to be there all the time uh you need to store the stuff in the logger in the event of a problem let's talk about iot sensor interfaces i showed you some of those just a few minutes ago analog digital sdi 12 and modbus they're very common uh we do all of those uh the only issue is for pressure sensors if you want to get simple most of the pressure sensors do do 40 20 milliamp uh but we can do either of them we don't it doesn't matter to us now another issue with uh managing telemetry network is what we call over the year management then the analogers can be pro can be uh reprogrammed over the year and the internet we can also update their software over the year and the internet and i'll just remind you that things like your iphone and your smart tv um you can also they get their software updated over the internet too so um so the uh be aware that this is common um the cell phone inside your iphone is also updated so what we're saying is the more you can do over the year the easier it is to manage such a network the communication system let's talk about the communication system uh telemetry and the iot um we've called it telemetry for many years but there's a new and more interesting name called the iot it's nothing different it's just telemetry it's the same thing now here's a bunch of technologies and you've probably heard of sigfox laura and so on and all these names there are so many options for us to get the data to the from the center the central computer we need to focus down and and look at some of those as groups we essentially have what we call lpwan solutions which is laura sigfox zp they're unlicensed they work but they're you want to manage them yourself you've got cell phone solutions and also private lte which is private cell phone systems they're managed and and licensed and they work very well we've got the satellite solutions gestation low earth orbit and also upcoming micro satellites um uh all of those networks satellite networks used to be expensive the price is coming down and obviously micro satellites are going to be more viable and more robust in years to come but they're not they're not there yet uh let's talk about payloads of data um lpwan is a simple message-based service like sigfox laura uh sigfox is 12 bytes right that's just not sufficient if you're doing ground water management it's just too small if you have the data points of temperature and level you blow that data package size it's just too small um cell phone very good uh in marsat geo very reliable like a cell phone iridium leo but this data very reliable but there it is 256 bytes it's a reasonable size you can get at a very appropriate ground water and also we have the emerging leo micro satellites these are not robust yet most can have 20 bytes that's not enough right um but there are some new ones coming they're playing 200 bytes and maybe they'll be robust in two or three years they're not yet but we need to keep an eye on them um is a technology comparison screen very important to to remind ourselves of the different technologies we have bluetooth which is good for five meters and it's unlicensed we don't we don't need to manage it because you can't get sufficient people in the room to cause congestion we then have wi-fi we then have lpwan then we have uh so really we see going 500 10 kilometers for lpwan and lpwan on ships and cell phones cell phones go to 50 kilometers pretty good and also the new uh the new narrowband iot because the bandwidth is reduced the range is substantially increased telstra's not sort of saying how much it is but our experiences this you got a 50 kilometer range before you'd have a 75 kilometer range now so the the narrowband with lte is much longer and of course we've got uh the traditional satellite uh companies in the high earth orbit and low earth orbit we need to talk about that as well let's talk about the satellite topology um we have equatorial satellites they're in mass that's one of those they're in equatorial they're 53 000 kilometers above the earth's surface and they appear to be stationary so they're apparently stationary if you're sitting on the on the ground and they're very good they have the size of a the a bus and cost one or two billion dollars so they're pretty expensive very reliable but it's a long way up to satellite back and need a lot of power these smaller ones are low earth orbit satellites and they're like maybe a thousand five hundred to a thousand kilometers above the earth's surface but because they're closer they rotate around the earth maybe once an hour and uh and so there's two different types of satellites you use let's talk about the uh mass sets are always there and people like iridium and global star are here and as are micro satellites coming up um this is an example of an iridium network pretty complicated if you're trying to get reading from here from the earth you've got to jump up to the satellite bounce through a few satellites and come down in america that's really a u.s military u.s government requirement um they don't want their messages going into other other other countries so they're very secure but the iridium network is very very very strong very robust very secure they've been expensive but it's still very good these are the nano satellites this is just an example look at the number of nano satellites we have a lot going on look at the number of satellite companies that are there there's so many of them and look at the ones that have launched something so uh they're really uh they're in a research and development phase at the moment in australia we have people like myriota they've they've they're coming to the fore but they're just not enough bytes it's just not sufficient bytes to be practical at the moment and also the satellite passes uh it could be several hours before you get it reading out you compare that to iridium where you get a reading in a few seconds so they're coming we need to keep an eye on them maybe five years time they'll be robust but they're not yet and that final question when you're comparing satellite services is let's consider you have an equatorial satellite uh in the uh 53 000 miles away and it's parked at stationery where and you have these small satellites going across the sky uh if you're on a flat plane the reception is exactly the same no problem but then have a look at this suppose you're in a valley if you're in a valley uh you may well be shaded to see that equatorial satellite so uh depends on how deep the valley is and obviously uh just depends on the top on topology we do a lot of work in canada in bridge columbia and my time is stopping me um uh you see an equatorial satellite in the deep valley is they uh it's impossible in some in some locations it's impossible so all we're saying is in australia well we don't have many mountains but if you're choosing the satellite technology be aware of the topology and make sure that um uh you consider that option uh my time's up uh rich so uh thank you very much and i've sorry i've been so fast with it but i'm happy to answer the questions later thanks very much matt i will just re-share my screen right so you've learned a bit about telemetry and you've learned a bit about design services that hydroteura offer um in terms of you know retrofitting a monitoring system to a mine site the reason i asked matt sort of focus on the telemetry side of things is often people already have some sensors in place and there needs to be careful consideration of telemetry options that can interface with those sensors uh from my experience we we get involved at every different phase that's just about possible some sites have no no have been doing manual measurement the whole time or they might have vibrating wire piezometers that are measured manually and they want to move to a telelimited system every one of them needs to be viewed on its own merits and often there's a diversity of sensors um so that's where hydroteura's experience sort of adds value so today we're going to talk about two case studies and um they both deal with sensing of groundwater and the telemetry aspects the there are some differences in terms of the types of telemetry used and in terms of the types of sensing devices used what i would say is that give us a call every system is different and we'll do our best to help you with that so we'll first talk about origin so origin energy um have a large coal seam gas field up in the Surat basin in Queensland and they need to monitor groundwater as part of their compliance requirements so we're engaged to really review their monitoring plan which was approved and to come up with recommendations on the configuration of a monitoring system to do that at that same time there were a bunch of other coal seam gas companies working up there and really we got to see a whole diversity of different ways that people were approaching that but they needed to collect long-term groundwater monitoring data from great depths the coal seams were from recollection 600 to 800 meters below ground surface and the standing water levels were around 100 meters below ground surface some complexities with the site where the water was actually very warm and that the other side of things was the sites were very isolated so sometimes you didn't have cellular coverage for example so this happened a while ago now back in 2010 but it was a really interesting project and a project of significant scale to some degree it shows the world hasn't changed a lot in other ways it shows the world's changed quite a bit um the the challenges of the project were really around collecting data from 120 different monitoring sites and this picture on the left that you can uh see there is the enclosure which we needed to have a double enclosure setup it's a very hot part of Australia so the outer the outer enclosure is actually really a sun shield and then the enclosure within it is houses the electronics there were two sorts of sensing devices that we had down these holes we had pressure transducers and in the end we installed bare sensors after some after some challenges so put them in by bare sensor it's one without the data logger so one of the decisions you have to make on these networks is do you want redundancy by having another data logger down the hole um some people like to have redundancy others don't that's part of what you need to to think through um the systems also have a data logger obviously at the top connect to the remote telemetry unit there was a diversity of telemetry both cellular and satellite coverage and we worked with uni data on that system and effectively federated the data back ultimately into origin scarter system so complexity comes when you're trying to select sensors as well as um select telemetry and interface two companies internal IT systems many of our customers prefer us to actually host the data in the cloud others like to trust their own server for security in which case we need to configure the systems onto their servers in this case this was a bit of both so we have remote oversight of this system as well as they have the data coming back into their scarter system that ultimately connects into the regulators network um which provides the long-term monitoring data for their models um it was a really interesting project and very challenging um data logging sensors don't last in the temperatures of the groundwater that were there and uh in the end uh that of the two sensing sort of technologies we used we had to custom build some bubbler sensors which allowed us to effectively achieve what nothing on the market would do with the bubbling system um the remainder of the systems were bare sensors bare bare pressure transducer sensors they were vented so another choice you need to make is whether you want a vented pressure transducer which means it has a tube that runs all the way to the surface and air can flow down that tube and effectively compensate for barometric pressure or you need to have a barometer a baro logo or a barometer at the surface that you use to do a compensation of the pressure transducer data so in this instance they went with uh vent tubes decisions on whether or not to use vented or um absolute pressure transducers really comes down to things like how moist is the area uh what's the likelihood of moisture getting in the vent tubes so if you're on a flood plain not a great idea to use a vented system but in this instance out in the surat there wasn't a lot of chance of any flooding happening so vented was a good choice okay next slide though the second uh project um that i wanted to talk about today was with gemco up in the northern territory on this particular site um we used really the unidata telemetry side of things and we used the solanced level logger range that um that has worked exceptionally well in this particular project it involved um effectively establishing a network of 40 sites um they wanted to simply measure level and temperature across sites on some of the sites they also wanted to have conductivity um and this particular site they've run with absolute pressure transducers so not vented ones like i was describing before so for that reason they needed to measure barometric pressure and to compensate those readings for that uh a logging interval of six hours was set up and daily comms to bring the data back in it is always worth thinking pretty hard about the frequency that you need to transmit data because there are costs associated with transmitting data and a lot of the time groundwater level data from a management point of view doesn't need to be managed uh at an extreme level of urgency so once a day is often sufficient in this instance there was uh uh the need to also interface that data into their equals software platform that they use for their environmental data and uh that was successfully done uh with some systems from unidata so unidata have their software called neon which allows us to manage the networks that also makes transferring data relatively easy to push through to other systems and see if there is in terms of the sort of configuration of what it looks like down the hole you've got a level logging pressure transducer here it has optical communications that come up through this wire here called a direct read cable it then comes up to a well head which is a very neat it's just a molded plastic thing that you uh suspend suspend the connector there and the level logger hangs down in the well one of your design considerations that you do want to think about is what is the likely fluctuation of your groundwater levels okay so the choice choice is always involve a compromise so the deeper the higher the range of fluctuation the higher the fluctuation range that pressure transducer needs to be able to accommodate and that means uh really in the case of the design of a pressure transducer it has a uh a membrane that flexes in response to pressure that's coming in through little holes that you can't quite see in this picture but the water flows in and it's pushing up and it flexes on that membrane and it's the bending of that these are electric surface they call it which changes the way the electricity moves across that this device then converts that into a depth so when you're choosing what depth range to use you lose accuracy if you say I want a hundred meter range because you need to have a thicker membrane to allow for those higher pressures so if you want really high accuracy readings then you need to select a uh a lower range so it's important to try and map out uh what your uh data requirements truly are for groundwater monitoring often I find that people are they look at a spec sheet and they say they want the most sensitive they can get in reality that leads to um compromises and potential uh vulnerabilities of the system when you look at how the groundwater data is actually used at the other end so definitely worth thinking hard about before you choose so the cables come up and they may ultimately interface so this is an sdi-12 sensor just Matt mentioned sdi-12 my experiences that hydrogeologists haven't always been trained in what sdi-12 is it's just a communications language just like french and german right but it happens to be one that was developed by the usgs and it's commonly used with a lot of environmental sensors the other one that Matt mentioned was modbus well modbus has used has been used traditionally a lot for more industrial applications but what we're finding is it's getting used more and more for environmental sensors recently so the signals come up and they go into the telemetry unit which is where unidata's smarts are located so in this instance that's called a neon unit which is the brand name that unidata give to these things and it was communicating across the lte network now this was a private lte network so it's like having your own little cell phone network and quite a few mine sites to do this and it was about interfacing to that network and using the neon software naturally installing it on the client server i wanted to keep this sort of all in-house in terms of that sort of things and then it was interfaced to equus as i mentioned earlier choosing enclosures is an interesting one the cheapest enclosure is no enclosure at all so there has been development of various smaller and smaller telemetry units that actually ultimately end up sitting inside your monitoring well standpipes or your well monuments i should say um in the case of unidata they have one called a micro and it's um it's a good it's a good little unit these are all pretty recent developments in the case of solans they have one called a level sender but it needs to um it needs the cellular network to work on so if you can fit your telemetry networks inside your well monuments and you're saving quite a bit of money on needing a post and a larger enclosure outside so that's one thing to keep in mind so if you've got a large monitoring network it's worth thinking about however if you want to do more than just run a pressure transducer offer you often find you need larger power supplies you might want a solar panel in which case these smaller units um are not suitable and you need to go for a bigger unit so in the case of the um this side we used a 3004 neon rtu which needed a larger external enclosure um so that's part of the design processes to decide what to use there um all of our systems have alarms automated in them and we have alarms for things like comms failures what does a comms failure mean it means either we're not receiving data back from our network or we're not receiving data upload into our software uh you can also set alarms against parameters okay so sometimes alarm is is this a realistic or unrealistic number we can set systems up to auto correct data and that might be based purely on something like is this number within a pre-approved range if not you can delete or you can replace with a number on the side of it these sort of data validation functions are pretty handy um that doesn't mean you lose your raw data it just means you've created a duplicate file for it so we do that using our data strength software um in terms of how this system actually all hangs together we spoke about the sensors or we've just showed a picture of that the instruments coming in it's connecting to the cellular network which is the gemco's private lte network it's going back into their server and into an equis server for the data management side of things and they're accessing it accessing that through their own internal IT network so it's quite a uh a clever network where are all the uncertainties for us as an integrator it's actually this interface here where we're tying into a client's network and that's where we need to be careful if we're using our own cloud life is easy we sort of control each of the steps if we're going into a client's IT it requires really good collaboration i'm happy to say this was a really successful integration into a private company's IT network okay i think i'm running a little bit short i'll go a bit more time it's all right um so in terms of what was the process we went through with gemco we actually ran trials of the network first make sure we could do all that configuring that we spoke about it's important sometimes to do end to end system testing to make sure you can actually get the data into their system and working in with their data management processes there are many things that can get in the way remember on one site we were actually just given one digit incorrect on a phone number for connecting in and it took a couple of weeks of troubleshooting to work out that that was all it was wrong so these things do take time so the trial was successful uh then we went to full scale so stage two was a full installation this occurred in june 2020 with 38 more monitoring boards attached to it um we developed an operating manual and a troubleshooting guide that was custom built for the site and we undertook training and ongoing support while we're still doing ongoing support on this particular side but these are the configurations of the enclosures that are at the top of these well monuments so you can see they're quite sizable in some particular sites all of that telemetry could be within that monument all right well thank you very much everyone for your time um you would certainly welcome any questions that you may have thank you Richard thank you Matt so if you have any question just pop in the Q&A section at the top of your screen please we are going to wait a few more minutes so you can type in the questions okay okay looks like Richard and Matt have carfidal questions thank you so much Richard and Matt for this webinar thank you all for participating on it just in two weeks we are going to have a new webinar please join us and Michelle yes that's all right just one saying thank you that's good good good thank you Luke as well so yeah John we uh see you in two weeks thank you so much and have a lovely rest of friday and weekend bye bye