Engineered fabric buildings have changed the game for remote mining in terms of onboarding and cost. The buildings are very durable sheltering options, making them favorable for difficult circumstances.
In remote mines, effective and adaptable infrastructure is necessary. Engineered fabric buildings have changed how remote mining projects manage their logistical challenges.
These buildings are multi-purpose and a very valuable inclusion for remote sites. Full pre-engineered structures can allow for expedited infrastructure delivery. For these unique and variable environments, getting infrastructure out there is critical.
Advantages of engineered fabric buildings
One benefit of engineered fabric buildings is fast installation or deployment. These buildings can be erected quickly with little time and labor unlike traditional buildings. Since installed buildings are ready to go with minimum downtime, the mining operation can begin at the project site towards their productivity and efficiency.
Another benefit is financial feasibility. The durable materials of engineered fabric buildings are also less expensive than traditional building materials. This timely financial feasibility gives opportunity to direct capital and resources toward the important things needed to ensure the project continues to operate at high standards of safety and functionality.
Durability is another consideration since engineered fabric buildings are eminently well-suited to remote areas with extreme weather events. For instance, engineered fabric buildings can remain functional in extreme heat or gale winds and provide shelter and protection for equipment and personnel in those environments.
The balancing act of providing appropriate shelter and protection is easy to see. Reassurance of reliability and safety is paramount, especially as teams continue operations in remote areas that offer little in way of equipment replacements or maintenance.
Adaptability to and management of environmental concerns is another benefit of engineered fabric buildings.
Since many structures have options for climate control and air ventilation that can be fully automatic, personnel can be highly productive and satisfied in their work environment when external environmental conditions range from heat, snow, rain, in addition to controlling the internal environment of the buildings. Protection of valuable capital and materials is just an additional benefit!
An insulated building with the ability to minimize energy consumption while still maintaining optimal internal temperatures for equipment and personnel is perfectly acceptable when looking at industrial standards for maintenance for manufactured built structures.
Portability and recyclability are more benefits that can set engineered fabric buildings apart. Engineered fabric buildings are not permanent. They are easily taken apart, moved, and relocated and reassembled quickly and efficiently.
Disturbance Zone and underground elements are the most typical projects for the long-term facilities where it would be beneficial to recycle engineered fabric buildings, but there is no limit.
Engineering fabric buildings can engage projects that require mobilization and re-assembly within weeks instead of a year. Imagine if all mining operations did this if possible?
Reducing sunk costs associated with the permanent laid structure for projects, while increasing the ability to mimic the other key pillars long-term planning with real-time assets ultimately leads to even greater value.
In the end, sustainability will emerge as another critical layer of ongoing value when clearly providing support to mine in an environmentally responsible manner while maximizing infrastructure investments.
Applications in challenging environments
Pre-engineered facilities provide custom solutions in challenging operational environments. Their modular design allows flexibility to create unique structures, whether it be for equipment storage or personnel housing. Additionally, their modularity allows for setup to be easily maintained, modified, or simply expanded as operational circumstances increase.
The adaptability of these types of buildings is essential in circumstances where conditions can change rapidly. For example, if an initial planned production capacity required a site expansion, you can include two or three additional units, whereas simply adding on to existing structures would disrupt the existing operation. This functionality is key to building efficiency and accomplishing operational targets in a dynamic scenario.
Pre-engineered buildings contribute to sustainability in the environment and social aspects of construction, through minimizing waste and environmental footprint, without compromising the desired outcome.
Their lightweight materials generally require less energy for transportation and assembly; therefore such structures can align with environmentally sustainable construction practices that are being prioritized in the industry.
In addition to serving its immediate operational need, utilizing such fabric structures addresses not only a present easily maintained operational solutions during the demand of current circumstances, but possibly future environmentally sustainable goals.
Safety aspects are imperative to remote operations for all organizations, and engineered fabric buildings meet this with ease. Pre-engineered fabric structures can be engineered with advanced fire resistant materials and emergency systems/activity for challenging remote sites, therefore maintaining workplace safety standards in isolated and hard to access locations.
Many engineered buildings can also include specialized ventilation systems for a variety of air pollution mitigation strategies, particularly when access to ambient air quality management is required, particularly pertinent to typical mining environments.
Maintenance of always focusing on safety features with structural integrity gives a facility like this flexibility to not only house sensitive equipment, but also create a safe work space in optimized and challenging locations.
Pre-engineered fabric buildings also provide rapid deployable flexibility to use as temporary command centers and emergency response shelters in remote locations.
In emergency sensitive situations or natural disasters, command centers and emergency shelters are a crucial part of an Operations’ base. Command stations and emergency sheltering structures provide a ready space for managing and housing emergency teams.
With their engineered robustness, fabric buildings can accommodate and house complex communication pieces of equipment, as well as monitoring systems to plan and address responders as if they were shown in a well-established building.
While providing emergency response facilities and capabilities in locations that may not otherwise have any established construction, these buildings typically have provided valuable emergency logistical capability and capacity where their buildings previously function as highly simple shelter-based operations when critical infrastructure is compromised or entirely absent in order to follow through or maintain continuity of operations in a difficult emergency situation.
Success stories and future trends
Engineered fabric buildings have had successful implementations in many sites and remote mining-facing operations, and we have heard excellent reports of remarkable benefits in operational performance when changing from traditional permanent infrastructure to engineered fabric buildings. The simplicity of assembly can lead to less time to installation and to start operations.
The savings can also be staggering. Companies are routinely spending much less on construction and identified program savings, which often meant less waste of building materials, and they are able to use some of these savings for other things. This value alone, really demonstrates the advantages to building engineered fabric buildings as a financially challenged solution.
In addition, because of technological advancements, some of the options in engineered fabric buildings could be much more exciting for new industries going forward.
Advances in materials science are now also presenting even more durable and more insulated materials to use in extremis environments. The more advances in technology emerge, the more we can generalize improving tailored solutions to a organization’s operational needs.
It is also becoming more common to see innovative uses for engineered fabric buildings with required technological enhancements as the remote sector pushed forward.
It is common to see based on technology use in IoT structural integrity and environmental condition monitoring sensors will be used in the installation process and base in site embedded sensors.
Using such technologies organizations can use predictive maintenance, better resource allocation, and enhance operational efficiencies.
In fact, as artificial intelligence and other automated technologies emerge and develop these buildings should get “smarter” and be able to provide automated responses to the changing environment, hazards and emergency protocols that draws a more premium case for engineered fabric buildings for future remote infrastructure.
Furthermore, we are beginning to see a trend of sustainable methodologies in engineered fabric building design. Manufacturers are beginning to work to incorporate recycling materials in engineered fabric buildings and mix more energy efficient designs to reduce damage to our planet.
The potentials for the future development of engineered fabric buildings with solar panels is potentially revolutionary, as it could offer facilities power autonomy.
The combination of sustainable technologies could greatly reduce facilities costs, but also reduce costings to global efforts to reduce the carbon footprints of industrial operations.
These sustainable solutions will be useful but essential as more environmental government legislation emerges over time. The innovative technologies also allow engineered fabric buildings to remain at the forefront of progressive thinking in support of, sustainable resource extraction.