My research continues and here's a pretty long post. I found...

My research continues and here's a pretty long post.

I found this thesis on fibre optic conveyor monitoring system submitted back in 2014. The author is now a phd candidate at UQ and works for Anglo American. Link:https://core.ac.uk/reader/43359560

I'm not sure if the research team is associated with Future Fibre Technology since I couldn't find anything further on that matter. However, from this thesis, it says:

"In summary, the fibre optic-based DTS system is able to provide real-time measurements, lower labour costs, higher accuracy and improved personnel safety in the monitoring of underground coal mine conveyor belt systems."

Sounds familiar right?

However, this thesis is about applying distributed temperature sensing (DTS) while Aura IQ is a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) based technology. Since I suck at science, I'm not gonna go through too much details of how those two sensing technologies work so let's just jump to what kind of results DTS and DAS generate.

DTS tells spatial and temperature resolution and thoese two results have a performance trade-off. When applying to conveyor monitoring, it means you get to know which part of the system is overheated at what degree.

DAS on the other hand, gives you a continuous feed of data on acoustic energy received along the fibre. Appearantly, Aura IQ is about feeding such data to machine learning and eventually, the software will instantly tell the end users what's actually going on with the conveyor belt system by analysing the real time data received.

Since Ai-2 is a DAS system, it makes perfect sense that FFT deceided to go with DAS. In addition, not every conveyor malfunction includes the element of overheating.

The results of this study does show that DTS is able to reflect real time temperature profiles of the conveyor belt structure and surrounding area. There are a couple weaknesses including energy lost when the fibre is bended, low accuracy with longer measuring time since heat transfers.

Imagine if we had a perfect DTS system that has high accuracy, even after long working time, that gives real time warning about the exact location of severe overheating. That system would be pretty impressive already.

What Aura IQ does pretty much tripples that. On top that, Aura IQ gives you way more information than location and temperature. The machine learning enables the software to visualize data with deep complexity.

If Aura IQ does deliver everything it has been promised, I think we might have our hands on something way bigger and revolutionary than we thought.

Or I could be totally wrong.

Yeah...