Mine shaft inspection assesses the condition of vertical and inclined shafts without halting production. Delta Scan uses a purpose-built shaft scanner to capture concrete liner condition, deformation, and service condition in 3D, removing the need for a manual descent or winder downtime.
Mine shafts are arguably the most safety-critical structures in the deep-level mining inventory. They are also among the hardest to inspect at engineering depth. Production shafts cannot tolerate winder downtime. Ventilation shafts are confined-space hazards by definition. Decommissioned shafts may contain unmapped water, gas, or unstable timbering. Traditional manual inspection, where a team descends the shaft on the inspection platform examining it by eye, is dangerous, slow, and inherently sample-based.
Delta Scan developed its shaft inspection practice on a specific operational engagement where a gold mining operator needed full internal condition assessment of a 980m production shaft with no winder downtime. No commercial tool could deliver a complete, accurate assessment at that depth. So we built our own: Shaft Analyser, a purpose-built shaft scanner that combines LiDAR with panoramic visual imaging and AI-assisted defect analysis, now deployed across operational shafts in Southern Africa. Every assessment is reviewed by registered mining engineers.
Not every mine opening is inspected the same way. Production and main vertical shafts are captured with our purpose-built shaft scanner. Ventilation shafts, ore passes, and tunnels, where the access profile is different, are captured with a collision-tolerant inspection drone. Both workflows are reconstructed and reviewed through Shaft Analyser and signed by a registered professional engineer.
