Devices can capture voice to 1,550 feet below surface.
View full sizeLockheed Martin engineers (from left) Tom Parks, Dave LeVan (seated), and Warren Gross pose for a photo at Lockheed Martin in Salina Tuesday with a device they developed that would allow communication with trapped miners. Salina, NY— Lockheed Martin Corp. in Salina is developing a device that uses magnetic waves to send messages to trapped miners.
The first time it worked two years ago at Howe Cavern south of Albany it was an Alexander Graham Bell moment for engineer Dave LeVan.
He and Tom Parks were on the surface, while Chris Dolen and Jacob Benko were several hundred feet below in the cavern.
“They were getting set up down there and I was sitting waiting with the computer running. All of a sudden I saw a message pop up ‘Are you guys ready to go now?’,” LeVan said. “I was very thrilled.”
If their device is approved by the Mine Safety Health Administration for use in mines, it will allow miners who become trapped in an accident to communicate with rescuers.
The company expects to get approval for its MagneLink Communications System within a couple of months, said Warren Gross, the program manager.
The company has received $570,000 in federal grants to develop the system, and says it spent much more than that on its own on research, he said.
The market for the device that could be used in any type of mine would be global, Gross said.
Lockheed Martin’s Salina plant is better known for designing and making electronic warfare systems, radars and sonars. But it has a commercial side as well.
After the Sago Mine disaster in 2006, Lockheed Martin retiree Gary Smith who now lives in West Virginia contacted his former colleagues in Salina to ask if there was some technology available that could help trapped workers communicate with the surface.
The suggestion found its way to LeVan, who researched the subject.
Lockheed’s team needed to overcome two challenges, he said. The device needed to penetrate deep into a mine’s layers of rock and earth. It also needed to operate in an environment where a single spark could touch off methane gas explosion.
View full sizeLockheed Martin Principal Research Engineer Dave LeVan with a device developed in Salina that allows trapped miners to communicate with the surface. The device uses magnetic waves to transmit digital voice and data.The system, which is patent pending, works much the same way a radio tower sends out radio waves to a car receiver that translates them into voice or music.
Lockheed’s system uses two devices that are about the size of suitcases that send out magnetic waves, LeVan said. A miner trapped below the surface speaks into a handset or types on a keyboard. That information is transmitted by magnetic waves through the earth to a device on the surface, which translates the information back into voice or data.
Lockheed’s devices capture voice down to 1,550 feet below the surface, and data down to 1,900 feet, Gross said.
During normal operations miners communicate by walkie-talkies, or by wired telephones. Those systems are likely to be destroyed or shut down if there is an explosion or accident, said Larry Grayson, a professor of mine engineering at Penn State University.
Mines are very large, and it’s common for a mine to be a square 10 miles long by 10 miles wide, with many tunnels running through it, he said. After an explosion, rescuers can drill holes through the earth to rescue those trapped, but they don’t know exactly where to look, Grayson said.
Mines are now required to set up emergency shelters throughout the tunnels that contain 96 hours of oxygen where miners can take refuge after an explosion or accident, he said. The government also requires that mines have devices that can communicate with the surface during an emergency. However, the government has yet to approve such a device, he said.
The plan is to place Lockheed’s devices near those shelters so that miners can let rescuers know where they are, and rescuers can tell them help is on the way, Grayson said.
It would provide trapped miners with hope, he said.
Since 2008, Lockheed’s team has been testing their devices in mines in Western Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia. Gross said the engineers have been very impressed with the suggestions that have come from people in the industry.
“Their focus was to keep this as simple to use as possible,” he said.
The technology had to be uncomplicated so that someone could use it in the high stress environment that follows an accident, Gross said.
“You basically pick up the phone and talk or you tweet,” he said.