A real-time system for monitoring and controlling underground mine environment.

Abstract

After hundreds of years of mining, the more accessible shallow mineral resources are being depleted, and some have now been exhausted. This leaves us underground mining as the only economical way of getting hold of the earth’s deeper mineral deposits. However, this method exposes an average mine worker to a harsh underground environment such as excessive ambient temperature in the workspace, dust, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and nitrogen oxides which are majorly liberated from blasting, mine fires, timber decay, drilling, incomplete combustion, and diesel engines, among others. This research focused on addressing the major gaps that have been existing in maintaining good underground miners’ working conditions. This happens through keeping track of the mine pollutant levels (temperature, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and dust) and controlling their concentrations by varying the mine air flowrate. The system further automatically produces warning signals (both visual and sound) for the worst scenarios. The system achieves its functionality through the use of a wireless sensor network (WSN) comprised of various sensor nodes around the mine workings that extract data from the mine and transmit it to the sink node that saves this information to the main database plus controlling ventilation fans.