A Time Varying Ventilation and Dust Control Strategy Based on the Temporospatial Characteristics of Dust Dispersion

Generally, an effective ventilation system is essential to reduce coal dust disaster. However, with the implementation of carbon tax and increase of energy and operating costs, it is urgent to design a cost-effective ventilation and dust control system. In this paper, a real driving face in an excavation laneway of coal mine in China was taken as the physical model, and the temporospatial characteristics of airflow and dust dispersion is investigated for the first time to design an original conception of time-varying ventilation and dust control strategy. Specifically, computational fluid dynamic (CFD) approaches are utilized to investigate the dynamic regularity of airflow behavior and dust dispersion, and parametric studies are conducted to select the appropriate ventilation pattern, which is validated to be potential in energy saving as well as dust removal efficiency. In addition, based on the selection of key time point according to the regularity of dust concentration changed over time, the most effective type of speed function is brought out for this novel ventilation system, which reduces energy usage up to 15.11% in a ventilation period. Furthermore, the accuracy of simulation result is verified by field measurements, which demonstrates that adjusting the ventilation velocity at the appropriate time point (case 7) can effectively control the dust concentration, which performs as well as the steady flow. The research results suggest that the further understanding of temporospatial characteristics of dust dispersion is helpful for ventilation design, and significant energy savings and dust removal requirements are verified to be possible in the proposed scheme.