The first step in mining activities is rock excavation in both mine development and production. Constant pressure for cost reduction and creating an improved/safe work environment for personnel has naturally resulted in increased use of mechanical excavation systems in many mining operations. Also, mechanical excavation and mining is more compatible with automation, meaning possibility of reduc...

This paper describes successful industrial research and development in the area of underground coal mining equipment automation. A brief background to underground coal mining is given, and the process of longwall mining is detailed. Some of the major limitations and issues impacting on the productivity and safety of the longwall mining process are highlighted, which serve to motivate the automa...

The seismic behaviour of underground structures is generally satisfactory compared to the above-ground ones. However, despite of the buried structure confinement, in recent strong seismic events some underground structure as tunnels, pipelines and tanks suffered high damage; for this reason, a strong effort is focused to evaluate the seismic vulnerability of these structure and to give codes in...

~ The major effect of removing riparian vegetation and wood from streams has been the changes in channel form (widening, deepening and straightening) that have occurred. It is important to consider that we are returning vegetation to a channel system that now has a much larger flow capacity. ~ The major hydrological effect of returning vegetation to streams is via its influence on roughness and...

1.INTRODUCTION Some forty years ago, most opening supports and reinforcements were designed using empirical rules defining ground loads acting on the supporting structures. This approach is still popular and interest in it has been renewed by the use of rock mass classification systems (Barton et al. 1974, Bieniawski, 1974,1976,1989). Correlations between rock mass conditions and the type of su...

Liquid sloshing is a common industrial problem affecting not only the dynamics of flow inside the container, but also of the downstream systems being fed from the container. This paper deals with the application of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for analyzing the possible effect of oil sloshing in compressors used in underground rail application on the continuous supply of lubricant to the ...

the first step in mining activities is rock excavation in both mine development and production. constant pressure for cost reduction and creating an improved/safe work environment for personnel has naturally resulted in increased use of mechanical excavation systems in many mining operations. also, mechanical excavation and mining is more compatible with automation, meaning possibility of reduc...

This article examines the changes that occurred in the rail network and density of population in London during the 19th and 20th centuries. It aims to disentangle the ‘chicken and egg’ problem of which came first, network or land development, through a set of statistical analyses clearly distinguishing events by order. Using panel data representing the 33 boroughs of London over each decade fro...

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 ...