Criterion for assessment of compliance of water consumption by the irrigation system of imported roadheaders with the requirements of Ukrainian regulations

Abstract

Over the past 10 years, the mining conditions of Ukraine's coal deposits have changed significantly. The development of particularly dusty seams has been discontinued and the transition from domestic roadheaders to imported ones has begun. And the normative document governing the requirements for roadheaders’ irrigation parameters has not been changed for the last 18 years. This makes the revision of certain provisions of the document a matter of urgency. Of particular relevance is the development of a criterion for assessing the conformity of water consumption by the irrigation system of imported roadheaders to the conditions of Ukrainian coal deposits. A comparison of the dust-generating capacity of seams mined when the normative document was issued in 2005 and those currently being mined showed that the maximum dust generation has now been reduced by 35%. This made it possible to reduce the normative indicator of specific water consumption from 100 l/m3 to 65 l/m3 of broken rock. The analysis of the normative methodology for the calculation of the water consumption by the irrigation system of cutter-loaders showed that these calculations take into account an understandable physical law of the reduction of the specific dust generation with the reduction of the coal hardness. However, roadheader calculations do not take this law into account. This leads to an underestimation of the allowable water consumption for hard rock and an overestimation for soft rock. To eliminate this drawback of the methodology for calculating the water consumption of the roadheader irrigation system, a regression dependence of the specific dust generation reduction was obtained when increasing the excavation productivity of weaker rock. The use of this dependency made it possible to determine the value of the equivalent productivity of the roadheader in terms of the dust factor and to formulate the criterion for evaluating the compliance of the water consumption of its irrigation system with the requirements of normative documents. The same dependence can also be used for a rough estimate of the equivalent productivity of shearers.