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October 2016
MODERN MINING
35
SAFETY IN MINING
feature
crowded PDS market
Above:
Booyco’s PDS is
assembled locally at the
company’s Jet Park facility.
Left:
The PDS transfers in-
formation between users via
Booyco Electronics’ human
machine interface.
remarks. “So even before the latest legislation
came into force, we were in a position where
we had a market that was broadly receptive to
the PDS concept. The new legislation, how-
ever, means that even those companies which
were sceptical of its benefits are now required
to implement PDS and this has given a further
boost to already healthy sales.”
In the years it has been in business, Booyco
– which counts most of the major ‘blue chip’
mining companies as its customers – has
installed its proximity detection systems at
mines all over South Africa. “South Africa
accounts for the bulk of sales but we do have
our products in use at mines in both Zambia
and Madagascar,” says Lourens. “Over the
years we’ve equipped around 45 000 people
and 5 000 vehicles and we believe we are the
market leader in Southern Africa.” He adds that
Booyco has seven branches in South Africa,
providing an extensive service ‘footprint’
throughout the country.
Booyco’s PDS – developed in collabo-
ration with German company
SELECTRONIC but assembled
locally at a facility in Jet Park,
Johannesburg – employs
very low frequency
( VL F ) a n d r a d i o
frequency (RF) tech-
nology. Pedestrians
are equipped with
two-way RFID tags
installed in their cap
lamps while vehicles
are fitted with VLF
antennae which create
stable fields of a prede-
termined size and shape
around the vehicle. When a
pedestrian enters the zone in which
the field is established, the tag is activated and
a warning signal is triggered and simultane-
ously the operator of the vehicle is also warned
that a pedestrian has entered the danger zone.
The VLF antennae create warning zones of
up to 15 m. The size of the warning zone that
can be achieved is dependent on the power
available – for example, from intrinsically safe
(IS) power supplies or DC/DC converters – as
well as the vehicle’s physical size.
Says Lourens: “Originally our PDS was
developed for use underground and in fact our
first customer was
one of the large South
African coal mining
companies. In 2015,
however, we extended
the product to surface
by adding GPS technology
to the mix. Our surface system
has proved exceptionally popular
and now accounts for a major part of our sales.”
Given that the PDS field is relatively young,
there is a clear need for some standardisation
of the technology, argues Lourens. “At the
moment, there are no standards or specifica-
tions governing the design and manufacture
of proximity detection systems – and, in fact,
no real agreement even on what exact capabili-
ties a PDS should have,” he says. “One result
of this is that the various PDS products on the
market can’t ‘talk’ to each other. This is unnec-
essarily restrictive and tends to lock mines into