Engineering a better solution for industry
Dr Galina Mirzaeva has been awarded over $158 000 by ACARP for an exciting industry collaboration. This success is likely to be followed by two more years of funding, leading to an industry-ready prototype.
Seeking to develop electrically safe Variable Speed Drives (VSD) for underground mining applications, Galina will work with R&D consulting company ResTech to develop a solution to issues around VSDs.
The project aims to develop, validate and deliver to the mining industry a technical solution which combines electric safety and electromagnetic compatibility of underground VSDs and surrounding equipment.
Modern continuous miners and shuttle cars used in underground mining are driven by VSDs. The main issues associated with VDS are harmonic distortion, bearing currents and resonance excitation. These can be alleviated by simple input filters but these give rise to another problem – unintended paths for fault currents, which can bypass protection and create safety issues under fault conditions.
By joining with ResTech, and having Ampcontrol Pty Ltd. as an industry partner, the researchers from UON can solve this complex problem and develop a new product for end users, which will have both improved safety and reduced harmonic pollution.
Galina is excited about the potential of this, her seventh ACARP-funded project.
“My earlier effort to develop advanced condition monitoring for mining motors was appreciated by open cut mining and received a 2015 ACARP Research Excellence Award. Now it is time to develop cutting-edge technical solutions for underground mining industry,” Galina said.
This project has the potential to offer a vast improvement to Health and Safety, Equipment and Mining System Reliability as well as contributing to high productivity.
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