Engineers at the University of Saskatchewan have set out to make potash mining in the province safer. Travis Wiens, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, says the mining industry brought them a project to evaluate the roofs of mines. Wiens says typically when entering a new area, miners will strike a roof with a long bar to hear if it sounds hollow or tight, to potentially tell if it is safe or not. He says the problem is, this method is somewhat subjective, so their project was to put to quantitative data into the evaluations to give newer miners more confidence and maybe automate the process.

Wiens says a student, Shariar Islam, spent 6 full days underground at Nutrien and Mosaic mines, striking the roof 3,000 times to record the sound. An expert miner was nearby to classify the noise made, and the information was then put into an artificial intelligent, machine learning algorithm, to see if it could predict the result, with successful results.

Wiens says the next phase is currently in negotiations to continue the research further. He envisions a handheld device that would give a assessment based off the sound made by hitting the roof. It would give a readout on whether it was safe, unsafe or unknown and needing more of an assessment. The project had financial support from the International Minerals Innovation Institute.