The 4th International Symposium on Mine Safety Science and Engineering (ISMSSE2018)

338 / 2018-05-21 14:09:34

Model test of the influence of longwall gateroad convergence on the mine ventilation process

longwall ,gateroad, convergence, ventilation, modeling

Mine occupational health and environmental safety > Ventilation

Hard coal mines are obligated to constantly ventilate mine workings in an amount ensuring the required air composition with a certain humidity and temperature, which will ensure proper comfort for mining crews employed in coal mining, especially deep deposits. All underground workings which are part of the mine ventilation network should be ventilated in a way that allows maintaining a proper oxygen concentration not lower than 19% (by volume), and the maximal allowable concentrations of gases in the air such as methane (CH4), carbon monoxide (CO) or carbon dioxide (CO2), should be kept at a constant level. The air flow in the mine ventilation network may be disturbed due to the natural convergence (deformation) and lead to change in its original cross-section. Reducing the cross-section of longwall gateroad causes local resistances which leads to emergency states in the mine ventilation network.
The article presents the results of numerical simulations of the influence of longwall gateroad convergence on the ventilation process in selected part of the mine ventilation network. The longwall gateroad convergence was modeled with use of the finite element method in the PHASE2 software. The influence of changes of longwall gateroad cross-sectional was carried out using the computational fluid dynamics method (CFD) in the Ansys-Fluent software.