Minehack 2016, a partnership between Unearthed and BHP Billiton, offered competition contestants an opportunity to develop prototype solutions for real-world challenges addressing more efficient and safer mining practices, with two UWA teams winning prizes for their ingenuity.
Software developers, designers and industry insiders came together and went from idea to prototype over the course of the weekend, demonstrating the power of the team effort in a time constrained environment.
First prize and people’s choice award went to UWA Alumni team “Conveyors of Wisdom” for their solution addressing one of BHP Billiton’s five challenges – the Conveyor Belt Challenge.
The team – Quenten Thomas, Thomas McCleery, Linden Blair, Craig Wale, Ben Colley and Callum Webb – worked on finding innovative approaches to conveyor belt wear measurement and analysis.
After 54 hours they delivered their pitch that promised, “More confidence. Less downtime” with a holistic, real-time conveyor wear measuring platform that eliminated the need for manual testing and offered a low-cost hardware solution.
Callum Webb, a UWA graduate and now an engineer at BHP Billiton, entered his third hackathon after initially being invited along for his first hackathon by his engineering thesis supervisor Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz.
“It is a stimulating experience, working with others and bringing together our different strengths and ideas to deliver a result far beyond what any of us could achieve alone.
“I think it’s fantastic that Professor Hodkiewicz involves her students and encourages their participation in events like this, it’s always a lot of fun,” said Callum.
For the third year in a row, the Young Innovators award went to UWA team “Clear Skies”. The team included Master of Professional Engineering students from Electrical and Mechanical Engineering, a graduate from the System Health Lab, and staff from the UWA Business School and Engineering Computing and Mathematics. The team was comprised of Ashwin D’Cruz, Kieran Hannigan, Tom McKeon, Rohan Mehra, Abdul Aziz, Nikola Petranovic, Jade Forlani-Brennan, Alastair Chin, Dr Stijn Masschelein and Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz.
Their mission was to forecast patterns to prevent high dust concentrations across the port as well as identify high dust impact sources and activities that might require retro-fitting of dust controls. The team developed a 10 day dust prediction tool that uses weather data to forecast dust concentrations. With this in hand, the tool also identifies equipment combinations to minimise dust generation for specified wind conditions. This would be available to operators through an easy to use web interface, interactive historical information on dust concentrations at the various locations was also available.
The Minehack 2016 presented another three challenges: Train Delay Classification and Performance Improvement; Collision Avoidance System; and Excavation Performance Visualisation. Seventy participants had fun working towards innovation, partnership and engagement in the development community over 54 hours – congratulations to all participants.
