Abstract
A reliable ventilation system is essential for maintaining a comfortable working environment and ensuring safety production in an underground coal mine. The automated fan switchover technique was developed for changing the main fan for maintenance with lower air flow volatility of underground mine in the switchover process. This article established the optimization model in the main fans switchover process, used the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve the model, and achieved minimum air flow volatility in the fans switchover process. Compared to previous studies, computer simulations have shown that the proposed algorithm can effectively find the global optimal solution with less initial parameters and achieved lower air flow volatility in underground mine. The particle swarm optimization solution, searching diversity, prevents it from confining to local optimal solutions and enhances convergence. The reasonable step length is beneficial to reduce the air flow volatility and main fans switchover time. The air flow volatility is larger comparatively when some doors are nearly open or closed fully at the start–stop phase of the switchover process. A case application in a China’s domestic coal mine shows that the air flow volatility of the underground mine in the main fans switchover process is no more than 0.4%.
Highlights
The ventilation system of an underground mine provides fresh air to personnel and equipment, dilutes pollutants and hazardous gases, and maintains a comfortable working environment.[1,2] On one hand, this system is of greater importance for a coal mine primarily because of the methane emission issues.[3]
Ventilation system needs to provide enough fresh air to dilute the methane to the regulated limit for preventing methane explosion hazards
It is obvious that each step of the blinds adjustment in the main fans switchover process is a nonlinear constraint optimization problem, which can be solved by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) method with both global and local searching capacity
Summary
The ventilation system of an underground mine provides fresh air to personnel and equipment, dilutes pollutants and hazardous gases, and maintains a comfortable working environment.[1,2] On one hand, this system is of greater importance for a coal mine primarily because of the methane emission issues.[3]. Keywords Constraint optimization model, particle swarm optimization, underground coal mine, fan switchover, air flow fluctuation A case application in a China’s domestic coal mine shows that the air flow volatility of the underground mine in the main fans switchover process is no more than 0.4%.
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