YieldPoint Inc.

We are a dynamic, global company in Kingston on the shore of Lake Ontario, in Canada. Our core skills are in the design and manufacturing of monitoring solutions for the measurement of all aspects of rock mass and reinforcement behavior around underground excavations.

Our highly innovative product line comprises both digital and optical instrumentation, which we support with world-class geotechnical research expertise. Case-in-Point, in 2019 we have introduced a new Bluetooth 5 geotechnical product line.

Typical applications include:

Ground movement monitoring

• Extensometers for precision monitoring of hard rock
• Civil extos for monitoring subsidence in soft rock
• GMMs for measuring convergence in potash and salt mine
• Crackmeters for monitoring individual cracks and interfaces
• Tiltmeters for monitoring angular deformation of structures
• Crown Pillar Monitoring

Reinforcement monitoring

• Optically instrumented rebar bolts with 1.25mm spatial resolution
• Digitally instrumented rebar bolts
• Instrumented 7-wire stand cable
• The world’s only instrumented Split-set bolt
• Instrumented fore-poles for large civil tunneling projects
• Tieback monitoring downtown Toronto.

Geo-environmental monitoring

• Thermo-strings for mining in frozen ground
• VW sensors and interfaces for monitoring stress and pressure
• VW interfaces for water-level monitoring
• HID cells for stress change monitoring
• Temperature monitoring for deep mining
• High resolution (1.25mm) optical thermal monitoring

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The YieldPoint Catalog

YieldPoint digital instruments are based on our proprietary d-tech embedded architecture. Every instrument has an on-board computer which performs tasks such as signal processing, reporting a unique sensor ID, conversion to real world units.

The result is a product line comprising of instruments, data-loggers, telemetry, and network gateways which is essentially ‘Plug and Play’. Recent developments resulting from the IoT revolution are integrated into our including Bluetooth 5, low power Wi-Fi and LTE-M.

The cost of providing real time monitoring solutions for geotechnical projects has never been lower!

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Case Study: Pillar recovery at Platosa Mine, Mexico

Authors: Samuel Freitag, Francisco Rodriguez, and Denis Flood

May 1, 2019

At Platosa Mine in Mexico YieldPoint dExto’s were used to monitor the back during the recovery of pillars. According to Samuel Freitag, the lead author, when the work was presented at the CIM conference(2019):

‘YieldPoint’s high resolution extensometers allowed us to monitor very small deformations. At first I thought that deformations less than a few mm were just noise, but because they appeared on multiple instruments and were synchronized with blasts we began to recognize and benefit from the high precision of these instruments”.

Working with consultants and researchers for the Colorado School of Mines, the project team at the mine was able to safely and confidently remove targeted pillars.

• Case Study: Pillar recovery at Platosa Mine, Mexico

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VantagePoint Cloud Platform

As low cost telemetry makes real time monitoring of geotechnical instruments a reality at most mines, the volumes of data generated by various monitoring systems have exceeded the capacity that can be handledby spreadsheets. Even standard SQL databases can begin to bog down.

VantagePoint is a geotechnical data platform (GDP) for the aggregation and visualization of geotechnical data. The platform is powered by a fast NoSQL database with a user-friendly API called DataPoint. The web-based visualization tool provides a responsive experience that encourages the user to develop cause-and-effect relations between instrument data, operational mining activity (Blasting events) and Seismic events.

As data accumulates in the system the opportunity exists to apply higher order analytics. Thus YieldPoint is actively developing +VantagePoint to help users unlock more value from the data generated through their instruments.

The solution can be configured using a cloud architecture or an on-site virtual server. Costing is scaled to the number of instruments and conducting a trial is a minimal expense. Pleases call today to so that you can take the pain out of data visualization.

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Our capabilities

YieldPoint also provides research services to universities and government agencies, usually involving customized solutions to critical components of large research projects. Research partners we have worked with include:

• Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
• Canada’s Royal Military College
• University of Lulea, Sweden
• University of Saskatchewan
• NIOSH, the National Institute of Safety and Health National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health which is the U.S. federal agency responsible for conducting research and making recommendations for the prevention of work-related injury and illness
• Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.
• The National Research Council (NRC) of Canada.

For a list of published papers click here.