Laboratory studies on remote method to assess the damage in underground mines after an emergency

Abstract

Obtaining fast and accurate access to disaster information for underground mines is key in order to enact safe and effective emergency rescue measures. This study proposes a method to remotely evaluate the damage status in underground mines after a mine accident by using a tracer gas. This discussion includes the laws of migration, mixing and separating the tracer gas in the airway, and the superposition of the tracer gas concentration curve conforms to the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which can be decomposed by the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. Based on the EM algorithm, the tracer gas method can assess the location and severity of the airway damage. The results show that the error between the calculated damage location and the actual damage location is very small. In addition, the area ratio of the concentration curve after the decomposition by the EM algorithms is highly correlated with the severity of the airway damage. This study demonstrates that the tracer gases can be used to remotely evaluate the location and severity of a mine accident, which is critical in order to perform successful rescue and emergency management.