Observations of the movements of air in underground passages have a long and fascinating history. Between 4000 and 1200 BC, European miners dug tunnels into chalk deposits searching for flint. Archaeological investigations at Grimes Graves in the south of England have shown that these early flint miners built brushwood fires at the working faces—presumably to weaken the rock. However, those Neo...

Communications in coal mines are poor by general industry standards, and generate significant risks in the lack of information available from underground areas. Mines often employ multiple incompatible systems for communication. This report concludes that there is no technical barrier to the upgrading of coal mine communications to equivalent standards of those used by general commercial and in...

The s ingle most c r i t i c a l f a c t o r a f f e c t i n g t h e h e a l t h and s a f e t y o f workers engaged i n t h e coa l -winning p r o c e s s i s the mine envi ronment ; which i s b r o a d l y d e f i n e d as t h e space i n which man works when underground and i n c l u d e s t h e p h y s i c a l and c h e m i c a l c o n d i t i o n s of t h e s u r r o u n d i n g e n c l o ...

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and the principal component of natural gas. Coal seams often contain significant quantities of methane, and underground coal mines must ensure that methane released into the mine during coal extraction does not build to dangerous levels. This is accomplished in part through the use of large-volume ventilation systems that remove methane from the mine and rel...

A real-time Diesel Particulate Matter (DPM) monitor has been developed on the basis of the successful National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) designed Personal Dust Monitor (PDM) unit. The objectives of a recently completed Australian Coal Association Research Program (ACARP) study were to modify the PDM to measure the submicrometre fraction of the aerosol in a real-time mo...

The importance of ventilation analysis has increased in recent years as a means to determine the optimum ventilation design. The problem of ventilation is quite complicated due to a number of factors, such as increasing length and other complexities of airways, and difficult geological conditions. Therefore, it has been strongly felt that an intelligent ventilation analysis system, which could ...