In: Civil Engineering
a) You have recently graduated and been employed as an assistant site engineer on an open-cut mine. Your supervisor asks you to assist with modernising some mine operations. In particular, you are asked to investigate how modern surveying and spatial science technologies might be used to improve management of the mine.
Describe four applications of modern surveying technologies that might improve mine management. For each of these: describe the application, identify and describe the surveying and spatial sciences technology that could be used, and explain their likely advantages and disadvantages.
b) You are working with a large mining company. On site there are a number of stockpiles. Some measure approximately 30 x 30 metres and are approximately 5 metres high; several others are larger, measuring approximately 80 x 30 metres and are over 10 metres high.
Your company needs to measure the volume of the stockpiles at the end of each month. You have been asked to investigate options for measuring the stockpiles.
List and describe the surveying technologies that could be applied to this problem. For each option, indicate how it would be used, and list its likely advantages and disadvantages.
a) Four application of modern surveying techniques that can improve mine management:
Disadvantage- the main disadvantage is that GPS wouldn't work in the places where sufficient number of satellites are not available.
Disadvantage- satellite can't take clear pictures of the location all the times due to weather problems.
b) Surveying technologies for volume measurements of stockpiles.
Disadvantages- only 2 dimensional images can be obtained and overlapping errors occurs.
Disadvantages- requires lot of image processing to overlap the images and further calculation.