The standard method for determining diesel particulate matter (DPM) exposures in underground metal/nonmetal mines provides the average exposure concentration for an entire working shift, and it can take weeks to obtain results. This approach is problematic because, although it reports that an overexposure has occurred, it fails to provide critical information about cause or prevention. Converse...

Effective gas management in coal mines, as well as proper ventilation design, is very important for maintaining the safety of underground coal miners. Advances in numerical modeling techniques have enabled evaluations of the coal mining environment using advanced grid designs and computed gas distributions through detailed mathematical models. These models help engineers to “see” the “unseen” a...

The Schneeberg mine in the south-western part of Saxony (Germany) is flooded up to the overflow level. The mine water discharges via a historical adit to the Zwickauer Mulde river. Although the Schneeberg mine has been flooded for a 50 years period, and it is relatively small, the mine discharges a significant arsenic load at a nearly constant level, which seems to be typical for base metal/ ur...

We present a methodology for long-term mine planning based on a general capacitated multicommodity network flow formulation. It considers underground and open-pit ore deposits sharing multiple downstream processing plants over a long horizon. The purpose of the model is to optimize several mines in an integrated fashion, but real size instances are hard to solve due to the combinatorial nature ...

The high-shear colloidal mixer is generally recognised as the most efficient method of mixing cement based grouts. Only recently however has this technology been applied to the production of cemented rockfill (CRF) for use in underground mines in North America. Traditionally, paddle type mixers have been used to produce the cement based slurries required for the preparation of CRF. While consid...

Total carbon (TC) is sometimes used to measure or characterize diesel particulate matter (DPM) in occupational settings such as underground mines. DPM samples are collected on quartz fiber filters. When using quartz fiber filters, adsorption of gas phase organic carbon (OC) has been reported, causing a positive bias in the particulate TC results (adsorption artifact). Most of the data on the sa...

The drive toward increased safety for coal miners has led to the development of computerassisted methods of underground coal mining. The development of control architectures for the control of the movement of continuous mining machines (tramming control) is an important part of this overall effort. The tramming control algorithm design described is in concert with hierarchical architecture desi...

OBJECTIVES Radon concentrations for 31 Polish underground tourist routes were analyzed. The equivalent dose to the lung, the effective dose and the relative risk were calculated for employees of the analyzed routes on the grounds of information on radon concentrations, work time, etc. MATERIAL AND METHODS The relative risk for lung cancers was calculated using the Biological Effects of Ionizi...