Caterpillar, Rio Tinto Reach Technology Agreement


Under a recently announced agreement, Cat’s CAES and Aquila drill and dragline systems are
designated as preferred equipment at Rio Tinto’s global surface mining operations. A CAES display
screen is shown here, mounted in a shovel cab.
Caterpillar Inc. and Rio Tinto recently forged a three-year agreement for Cat’s CAES and Aquila drill and dragline systems to be the preferred standard at the mining company’s open-pit operations worldwide. The agreement covers nine Rio Tinto business units operating more than 30 mines in Australia, the United States, Canada and Namibia. The Caterpillar high-precision GPS mining technology products provide machine guidance and operator assistance as well as data collection of multiple production parameters.

Rio Tinto is expected to order more than 200 Caterpillar high precision systems over the life of the agreement. In addition, the agreement includes a multi-year support contract. Caterpillar dealers responsible for selling and supporting the products are WesTrac and Hastings Deering in Australia; Hewitt Equipment in Canada; Quinn Company, Wyoming Machinery, Wheeler Machinery, Tractor & Equipment and Wagner Equipment in the United States; and Barloworld Equipment in southern Africa.

According to Caterpillar, the three high precision systems involved in the agreement have been proven in mines around the world and continue to evolve to meet the needs of mining operations. For example, both the CAES and Aquila Dragline systems now provide peer-to-peer communications, allowing an operator to view the position of each CAES-equipped machine within the work zone by looking at the display in the cab. For truck loading operations, CAES displays a digital map of the orebody and material types to the loading machine operator.

Features of the Aquila Drill Manager include automatic adjustment for variations in collar elevations to ensure level benches as well as monitoring and reporting of six key drill parameters in real time. A sophisticated strata recognition module is available to determine variations in rock mass characteristics.

The Aquila Dragline System is a comprehensive production monitoring system that tracks every bucket load. Features include 3-D real-time bucket positioning and monitoring and reporting of 10 production parameters, including average swing time, total load weight and average cycle time.

As featured in Womp 07 Vol 8 - www.womp-int.com