Belt conveyors are presently the most common transportation machines used in surface and underground mining

In the material transfer area, the belt is exposed to considerable damage, the energy of falling material is lost, and there is significant dust and noise. One of the most common causes of failure is transfer chute blockage, when the flow of material in the free fall or loading zone is disturbed by oversized rock parts or other objects, e.g., rock bolts. The failure of a single transfer point may cause the entire transport route to be excluded from work and associated with costly breakdowns. For this reason, those places require continuous monitoring and special surveillance measures. The number of methods for monitoring this type of blockage is limited. The article presents the research results on the possibility of visual monitoring of the transfer operating status on an object in an underground copper ore mine. A standard industrial RGB camera was used to obtain the video material from the transfer point area, and the recorded frames were processed by a detection algorithm based on a neural network. The CNN autoencoder was taught to reconstruct the image of regular transfer operating conditions. A data set with the recorded transfer blockage state was used for validation.

The transport sector, including air transport, represents an important source of air pollution. The present article deals with the current situation regarding greenhouse gas emissions in the air in 27 European Union (EU-27) member states. Every member state is characterized by selected parameters that determine the unique nature of a particular country (e.g., population, area, life expectancy, gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, etc.). In addition to these parameters, there were also other parameters which were monitored as they characterize the amount of greenhouse gas emissions and the impact of aviation on these emissions. The main purpose of the article is to compare the European Union member states on the basis of 15 examined parameters. The identification of similarities between the EU-27 member states with regard to the selected parameters was carried out by applying principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis. The average linkage method was applied to create a dendrogram representing the similarities between the examined member states. The value of the cophenetic correlation coefficient CC = 0.923 confirmed the correct application of the average linkage method. The cluster analysis outputs were five similarity-based homogeneous groups (clusters) into which the 27 member states were divided on the basis of the examined variables.

This paper investigates rubber composites subjected to impact loading. One of the objectives was to determine the effect of the support system on the impact force value. Another objective was to identify the correlations between the force characteristics of the impact process, i.e., between the impact force and the tensile force. The identified correlations between the impact process characteristics have been subjected to regression analyses, and their outputs were regression models describing the dynamic stress of rubber composites during the testing of their impact resistance. At dynamic loading, the key factor was the support system, which eliminates the force effects of the falling material that damages the rubber composite, in particular a conveyor belt, and may even lead to the loss if its functionality. In real operations, conveyor belts are stressed by the impact of the transported material onto the belt surface at sites where the conveyor is filled or at chutes, and this often results in belt damage. In many cases, such a belt is no longer usable, and significant financial loss is therefore incurred due to the need for replacement of the damaged belt and due to consequent downtimes.

The present manuscript proposes a novel method for the measurement of a trajectory of a falling impact hammer in the dynamic loading of conveyor belts and the determination of their impact resistance. The proposed method has been experimentally tested and the results of the measurements are presented in this manuscript. The proposed method is based on the long-exposure photography with a long-duration opened shutter of the Nikon D5000 DSLR camera. Results of the experimental research were compared with direct reference measurements performed using the L-GAGE LT3 laser distance sensor. Differences between values, obtained by the new method and by the reference measurements were up to ±3 mm. The standard deviation identified in all the experiments was 1 mm.