Test – Finding fault: IUP’s Fault Wizard keeps mines running

In mining, production is king. The high costs of running a mine including manpower, electricity, water, processing, diesel fuel and maintenance, just to name a few key items, mean that downtime is something to avoid. The costs of not working add up quickly.

Responsible mining companies are meticulous in their health and safety protocols, but accidents or delays can and do happen. When there is a work stoppage, it’s up to superintendents and mine managers to ensure that things get resolved and the operation is back up and running as soon as possible.

One of the most common reasons for a delay is an interruption of power to the mine. In underground mines, power cables are suspended from tunnel roofs, while underground mining machinery move around dragging power cables behind them. These cables take a lot of abuse, so it’s not surprising that they frequently short out.

Mining companies need a way to repair those shorts quickly, but the trouble is being able to identify the fault in a power cable, which are hundreds or even thousands of feet long. It was this problem that led to the introduction of the Fault Wizard – a portable device that can easily identify faults in power cables – in underground mines.

The Fault Wizard, the invention of John Smith and Kirk Moser, founders of Innovative Utility Products Corporation, was originally designed to find faults in underground utility cables. But a chance meeting at a utility trade show marked a shift in IUP Corp’s business strategy, where the Fault Wizard’s repertoire was expanded to underground coal mines.

The man instrumental in making that shift happen was Mike Lester. At the utility conference an electrical engineer from a coal mine suggested the Fault Wizard could help with power faults in mines, so the engineer suggested to Smith that he contact Mike Lester, an electrical engineer friend.

Smith agreed to tweak the machine, and for the last 10 years Lester and his company, Skaff Engineering, have been the rep for IUP, selling the Fault Wizard into coal mines in the Eastern United States, including Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky, and West Virginia, where Lester is based.

Since then, Lester says he’s sold over 600 units in his region. He often pitches the machine directly to coal mines, and claims he can teach any card-carrying electrician how to use it in less than 30 minutes.

So how does the Fault Wizard work? Based on automated arc-reflection technology (AART) developed by IUP, the display on the portable unit shows the distance in feet or metres from the machinery to the fault location. The technology for identifying faults in the cable works up to 10,000 feet.

It essentially works by emitting an electrical pulse through the cable, which recreates an electrical arc, thus enabling the Fault Wizard to calculate the distance from the machine (or cable hanging from a tunnel roof) to the fault.

For example, let’s say a continuous miner machine, used in underground coal mines, accidentally runs over the cable trailing behind it and incurs damage. The cable is now weakened and more susceptible to a short circuit. When that happens, the breaker is tripped, shutting power to the operation. It’s at that point that the Fault Wizard is brought in. Workers isolate the cable at both ends, connect the Fault Wizard to the 1,000-volt cable, and begin testing to determine the location of the fault. When the fault is identified, the cable is spliced open, repaired, and the power turned back on.

Trailing cables used by machines can only be spliced so many times before they become too weak and unreliable, at which point they need to be replaced. It’s the equivalent of a garden hose that keeps getting cuts in it and needs to be taped over to contain the leaks. Eventually that hose is no good and needs to be thrown away.

This technology wasn’t new, but what IUP did was facilitate the interpretation of wave forms, and made the unit much smaller. Previously a fault detection device was around the size of a refrigerator. Devices called “thumpers” can do the same thing as the Fault Wizard by listening for the fault in the cable, but this method “is a bad way to run a railroad,” as Lester puts it, because the process is so forceful it can blow copper out of the fault, damaging the cable even more.

“The Fault Wizard has found that sweet spot. That fine line of having enough energy to recreate the fault, but not damage the other spots that you’re not looking for, that haven’t caused you any problems yet,” he said.

“And instead of looking at all these wave forms that are really hard to interpret, the Fault Wizard will give you a reading on a screen, say 622 feet. So that makes it easy to use and that’s why utilities and coal miners love it.”

The Fault Wizard also works well for hanging cables and trailing cables from 600 to 15,000 volts. Without the Fault Wizard it could take days to find a fault in one of these cables which often run for thousands of feet through a tunnel. With the Fault Wizard, identifying the fault takes less than 30 minutes. That’s where the cost-benefit analysis really pays off. While a unit costs about $10,000, the machine pays for itself many times over. It saves the mine a lot more than that in lost productivity.

Another plus, compared to competing models, is it’s battery-operated. That means the device can be used in parts of the mine where there is no power source. Operators typically get about five years out of the batteries before they need replacing.

As for the market for the Fault Wizard, John Smith said at the height of the mining supercycle, in 2010, the number of units sold into the mining industry exceeded that of utilities, but since the downtown in coal mining, utilities represent most of IUP’s marketshare, currently.

But IUP Corp is looking to expand to other mining sectors beyond coal, such as underground copper, gold, uranium or potash mines.

“We don’t really have much competition on the mining side,” said Smith. “I think there’s a whole lot of untapped market out there to sell the Fault Wizard into mines around the world.” He added that IUP has sold into South Africa and also has customers lined up in Chile and Colombia.

Over the last 18 years, IUP Corp has sold about 2,500 units worldwide.

The Arkansas-based company is currently looking for mining service companies and distributors to represent its products, as it seeks to expand its marketshare. For more information on IUP Corp and the Fault Wizard, visit the website at iupcorp.com.