Page 14 - Advanced Mine Ventilation

Preface

Maintaining a healthy and safe air environment in an underground coal mine is a sine
qua non for efficient coal production. There are three main hazards associated with
coal mining air environment. First, coal mining process creates many respirable dusts,
such as, coal and silica dust, and diesel particulate matter (DPM) which can be hazard-
ous to human health in high concentrations. Some of these dust clouds can also be
explosive.
Secondly, coal seams inherently contain many combustible gases, such as, methane
and ethane that can become explosive when mixed with insufficient volumes of air.
Several thousand fatalities have occurred because of methane and dust explosions in
the coal mines of the world since the beginning of coal mining some 200 years ago.
The above two problems are minimized by mine ventilation. Large volumes of air,
often 20 tons of air for each ton of coal mined, are circulated through the mine work-
ings to dilute the gas and dust concentrations to safe levels. Proper design of mine
ventilation is thus crucial to mine safety.
Thirdly, all coal seams have a tendency for spontaneous combustion (slow oxida-
tion of coal) when it comes in contact with air. If no corrective actions are taken, the
coal can catch fire leading to the loss of the mining section and sometimes, the entire
mine.
The purpose of this book is to address the four related issues in detail to make coal
mining a safe and profitable business. In modern, highly productive coal mines, venti-
lation alone cannot provide adequate control of pollutants. Special techniques for mini-
mizing the risks of respirable dust, combustible gases and mine fires are needed.
Most of the existing knowledge on mine ventilation has been derived from the
following three books published 50e60 years ago:
Mine Ventilation: ed. A Roberts (1960).
1.
Mine Ventilation and Air Conditioning: ed H Hartmann (1961). The book was reprinted in
2.
1982 and 1997 with only minor changes.
Mine Ventilation: A Skochinsky and V. Kamarov (1969)
3.
These books provide good basic knowledge of mine ventilation (and air condition-
ing in deep metal mines) but they could not cover the new developments in all four
critical areas mentioned above. A tremendous amount of research and innovation
over the past 50 years have resulted in:
Digital (computerized) design of mine ventilation able to compute air flows, pressure losses
1.
and the concentrations of many pollutant in all junctions and airways of the mine.