Abstract
Coal dust explosions (CDE) are one of the main threats to the occupational safety of coal miners. Aiming to identify and assess the risk of CDE, this paper proposes a novel method of fuzzy fault tree analysis combined with the Visual Basic (VB) program. In this methodology, various potential causes of the CDE are identified and a CDE fault tree is constructed. To overcome drawbacks from the lack of exact probability data for the basic events, fuzzy set theory is employed and the probability data of each basic event is treated as intuitionistic trapezoidal fuzzy numbers. In addition, a new approach for calculating the weighting of each expert is also introduced in this paper to reduce the error during the expert elicitation process. Specifically, an in-depth quantitative analysis of the fuzzy fault tree, such as the importance measure of the basic events and the cut sets, and the CDE occurrence probability is given to assess the explosion risk and acquire more details of the CDE. The VB program is applied to simplify the analysis process. A case study and analysis is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of this proposed method, and some suggestions are given to take preventive measures in advance and avoid CDE accidents.
Highlights
Coal dust, produced in coal mining activities, can lead to coal dust explosions (CDE), posing a serious threat to miners’ occupational safety [1, 2]
Visual Basic (VB) program is employed to overcome the difficulty of large amount of computation and artificial mistakes in the quantitative analysis process, which limits the direct application of conventional fault tree analysis (FTA)
The authors proposed a novel method combined fuzzy set theory and VB program for identifying and assessing CDE risk, which could play an important role in the prevention of CDE accidents
Summary
Coal dust, produced in coal mining activities, can lead to coal dust explosions (CDE), posing a serious threat to miners’ occupational safety [1, 2]. Few studies have been done to investigate a scientific assessment of CDE risk and obtaining the exact probability data of each basic event is almost impossible, which limits the application of conventional fault tree analysis (FTA), due to the complexity and fuzziness of coal mine environment. VB program is employed to overcome the difficulty of large amount of computation and artificial mistakes in the quantitative analysis process, which limits the direct application of conventional FTA Under this background, the authors proposed a novel method combined fuzzy set theory and VB program for identifying and assessing CDE risk, which could play an important role in the prevention of CDE accidents. The CDE fault tree includes fifty basic events and we can acquire 1120 MCSs, so we need to employ a computer program to simplify the analysis process. To illustrate the proposed method, the Zhuxianzhuang Coal Mine, which has a risk of CDE, is taken as an example
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