Real-time system for monitoring and controlling underground mine environment.

Abstract

The extraction of minerals from the earth has been an essential element in the development of human society since the dawn of civilization. After hundreds of years of mining, the more accessible shallow mineral resources are being depleted, and some have now been completely exhausted. This means that the economic exploitation of more of the earth’s deeper mineral resources is now required in order to meet society’s growing demand for minerals leading us to underground mining. The activities carried out in order to obtain these minerals from the underground mine has dangerous element in them. The increased exposures of underground mine workers to poor air quality and high temperature in underground mines has caused a lot of health problems such as serious respiratory diseases, lung damage, reduce resistance to infections, increase fatigue and many others to the worker. Therefore, the real time system is developed to monitor and control underground mine air condition. And these was done by designing and developing hardware subsystem and a web-based application for monitoring and controlling underground mine air environment condition. The system has therefore resulted into reduction on the exposures of workers to contaminants in the underground, the mine workers are able to know the appropriate time to return to the mine after blasting, and alerting miners within the underground mine when the concentration level of the contaminates exceeds the threshold value. We concluded that the developed system addresses the major gaps that have been existing in maintaining underground mines’ health working conditions. This happens through keeping track of the mine pollutant levels and controlling their concentrations by varying the air flowrate plus producing warning signals for worst conditions automatically by this system. On top of that, this system offers insight of the current contaminant concentrations in the mine to personnel who would wish to enter the mine through display of these values on a mega computer screen on the ground station and on the local crystal display (LCD). Keywords: controlling, monitoring, underground mining, minerals, extractions, concentration, contaminants, threshold values.