Analytical Instrumentation & Environmental Monitoring


Water quality monitoring for a large mining operation

April 2018 Analytical Instrumentation & Environmental Monitoring

Water quality as part of environmental responsibility is a key element to triple bottom line reporting, with water licensee operators needing to provide data for licensing authorities and compliance data for reporting. Omniflex has tackled the challenges for this type of remote monitoring application head on at a large mining operation and has dealt with a number of key issues:

• Remote unprotected and unmanned sites

• Solar power

• Vandal proofing

• Automated operation

The project required that monitoring systems be installed at key sites geographically spread over a few hundred square kilometres to track wastewater and mine water outflows back to the riparian system, ensuring that the mine had a complete view of its discharge and treatment of wastewater over its entire operation. Data collected was to be shared internally across the enterprise to processing plants and to a GIS system for open reporting and to the Department of Water Affairs.

Any analytical measurements required could be incorporated into the system. Typically the following were required: flow rate, totalised flow, dissolved oxygen, pH, conductivity and turbidity. All three of the above architectures were required for the client to manage data across the organisation and satisfy its management objectives.

Omniflex provides cost effective, adaptable and extensible solutions from single point small systems to large corporate enterprise monitoring, allowing the integration of existing equipment and legacy systems but at the same time providing the management tools to manage an aggregated view of the enterprise without a labour-intensive capture and collation process. This system also enabled automated reporting for compliance management and driving the environmental action plan reporting.

For more information contact Ian Loudon, Omniflex Remote Monitoring Specialists, +27 (0)31 207 7466, [email protected], www.omniflex.co.za



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