PARTNER CONTENT: A large coal enterprise in China, Jinneng Holding Group has been active accelerating 5G innovation in intelligent mining, particularly in remote roadheader control. This innovation hinges on the back of 5G networks built by China Mobile Shanxi using Huawei’s 5G solutions. Based on these networks, Jinneng optimized its operations and engineering processes to support 5G intelligent remote control of roadheaders in its Tongxin Mine. The latency is less than 100 ms with a reliability of 99.99%, making it truly possible for the mine to control the roadheaders remotely. With remote control, a single heading face requires 6 fewer workers a year and saves 500 m of photoelectric composite cables.

5G remote roadheader control is one of several innovations coming out of the Shanxi Intelligent Mining Innovation Lab, which was formulated by Jinneng in partnership with regulatory agencies, Huawei, and Shanxi Cloud Era to drive breakthroughs in mining information networks, automation enablement, smart sensing, mining big data, and ecosystem collaboration. The heading face is core to coal mining, and the operations involved pose safety risks and take place in some of the harshest environments. But this is where 5G comes in. 5G takes workers out of these areas and improves safety. Jinneng has shown keen interest, introducing it to enable the remote control of roadheaders.

148 5G pRRUs are deployed in the Tongxin Mine where the pilot is. The base stations are moisture-, dust-, and explosion-proof and work with a 3:2 uplink and downlink bandwidth configuration, ensuring full coverage across underground areas and the high bandwidth required by the fully mechanized mining faces and heading faces. The precision of remote equipment control is improved from 99.9% to 99.99%. The UPF of the core network is locally deployed and ‘kite-like’ networking is used to ensure high reliability, stable operations, and on-premises data processing without any interruptions even though the connection to the public network is lost. The cloud-network solution enables 5G base stations to transmit data to the ground core network, and slicing ensures high reliability and low latency for 5G services. As such, the same infrastructure can be used for many other underground applications.

Fiber on the fully mechanized mining faces is prone to damage as the equipment moves around, and this poses a serious risk to continuous signal coverage there. To address this challenge, leaky cables are used to extend 5G signals across the fully mechanized mining faces. This delivers a high capacity and a handover-free experience while simplifying cable maintenance. This improvement also lays a solid foundation for 5G intelligent remote control applications.