Abstract
Environment monitoring is important for the safety of underground coal mine production, and it is also an important application of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). We put forward an integrated environment monitoring system for underground coal mine, which uses the existing Cable Monitoring System (CMS) as the main body and the WSN with multi-parameter monitoring as the supplementary technique. As CMS techniques are mature, this paper mainly focuses on the WSN and the interconnection between the WSN and the CMS. In order to implement the WSN for underground coal mines, two work modes are designed: periodic inspection and interrupt service; the relevant supporting technologies, such as routing mechanism, collision avoidance, data aggregation, interconnection with the CMS, etc., are proposed and analyzed. As WSN nodes are limited in energy supply, calculation and processing power, an integrated network management scheme is designed in four aspects, i.e., topology management, location management, energy management and fault management. Experiments were carried out both in a laboratory and in a real underground coal mine. The test results indicate that the proposed integrated environment monitoring system for underground coal mines is feasible and all designs performed well as expected.
Highlights
Safety is the top priority of coal mine production and plays an important role in it
In order to prolong the lifetime of sensor nodes, and at the same time ensure the environment of underground coal mine be monitored efficiently and constantly, two working modes are used in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), called periodic inspection mode and interrupt service mode
As the traditional cable monitoring system (CMS) cannot collect all the required environmental parameters and is difficult to deploy in complex areas such as the mining areas and the mined-out areas of mines, WSN
Summary
Safety is the top priority of coal mine production and plays an important role in it. Due to the complex working conditions in underground coal mines and the limitations of the CMS, it is difficult for the CMS itself to comprehensively and effectively monitor the environmental parameters which have important impact on the coal mine safety production, such as gas, pressure, coal dust, temperature, wind speed and carbon monoxide (CO) levels. Strategies for deploying a long distance WSN in an underground coal mine have been put forwarded by Yang [7], Akyildiz has discussed the challenges of using WSNs in underground environments in his theoretical research [12], and Xiao has proposed a multi-path WSN routing protocol for mine security monitoring [14] Most of these works are theoretical research focusing on certain technology or just focusing on the technologies of the WSN.
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