[ti:Miners Say Coronavirus Has Led to More Industry Automation] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]更多听力请访问51VOA.COM [00:00.04]International mining officials say the coronavirus crisis [00:06.68]has led to increased automation in the industry. [00:13.16]The changes are likely to lead to lower costs and smaller, [00:19.40]cleaner mines where more can be done with fewer people, the officials said. [00:28.12]Industry leaders spoke about the issue at the Imarc mining conference [00:35.04]in the southeastern Australian city of Melbourne. [00:40.52]Conference attendee Suresh Vadnagra [00:44.76]is the chief technology officer for Newcrest, [00:49.32]one of the world's largest gold-mining companies. [00:54.00]"The pandemic has forced us to think about [00:58.28]how we can do more of the work that had to happen on site, remotely. [01:05.00]And how we do those tasks with less people," he said. [01:11.76]An increasing number of companies are looking at ways [01:16.32]to better use machines and "big data" [01:20.40]to improve their business operations, Vadnagra added. [01:26.28]Big data is a term for very large amounts of information [01:32.00]produced by people using the internet. [01:35.64]Big data can only be stored, understood and used [01:41.24]with the help of special computers and methods. [01:46.48]Australia's three largest ore mining companies [01:50.68]already have control centers in cities [01:54.36]that supervise parts of their operations [01:58.12]from hundreds of kilometers away. [02:02.36]Such centers are becoming more common. [02:07.24]Experts say one example of big data's use in the industry [02:13.00]is in ore collection operations. [02:17.56]When sensor equipment is placed inside drill holes, [02:22.36]it can provide positioning data and identify ground materials. [02:29.76]Such data permits mining companies [02:33.28]to use machine learning to produce models [02:37.80]to help improve explosive mining methods, said Dirk van Soelen. [02:44.32]He is the vice president of explosives manufacturer Dyno Nobel. [02:52.20]Improvements like this, along with new technologies, [02:56.96]will help British mining company Anglo American reduce costs [03:02.96]by 10 to 20 percent in coming years, Chief Executive Mark Cutifani said. [03:11.64]"Using automation and industrial processes, [03:16.00]we have changed mining methods," he told Reuters news agency. [03:21.96]Cutifani said his company had started using imaging technology [03:27.92]to automatically scan and divide pieces of ore. [03:33.92]The method is expected to be used throughout the company [03:38.40]"in the next few years," he added. [03:42.76]The technology has led to drops in Anglo American's "energy intensity," Cutifani said. [03:52.20]Big data is also permitting companies to better track energy use [03:58.72]and carbon emissions, said Bas Mutsaers, [04:03.16]a marketing expert at European energy company Schneider Electric. [04:10.24]"We can use this data to confirm our understanding [04:15.08]of the processes at the site, to see correlations," Mutsaers said. [04:21.64]This could help miners predict when to use, produce, [04:27.56]store or sell energy on solar farms, he added. [04:34.08]Machine learning methods can permit companies "to do this [04:39.52]at ever higher levels of complexity and speed," Mutsaers said. [04:46.84]I'm Bryan Lynn. 更多听力请访问51VOA.COM