Numerical assessment of the water-flow hazard to workers in the water disaster of underground mine

Abstract

Abstract Understanding the details of the water-flow hazard (WH) to workers in water disasters is extremely important in disaster-risk management. This paper aims to develop a numerical assessment model for the WH affecting worker safety. An assessment model of WH is proposed for water disasters in the underground mine, which includes two characteristics: (a) from water-disaster environment to WH of workers and (b) from multiple influencing factors to quantitative comprehensive quantification. To verify the feasibility of WH, it is applied to a water disaster in an underground coal mine. The simulation results highlight that the WH model can assess the hazard value of worker-1 (m = 72 kg, H = 1.72 m) at paragraph – 6134 and paragraph – 8840 of roadway, with different water-flow conditions, in the whole time of the disaster. Meanwhile, the differences between WH for three workers, worker-1, worker-2 (m = 95 kg, H = 1.82 m), and worker-3 (m = 60 kg, H = 1.62 m), under the same flow conditions are provided by the curve. Moreover, dynamic visualization of WH is achieved, which shows how the hazard of worker-1 changes into the time of 2, 5, 11, 19, and 27 h after a disaster in the full mine. Therefore, this numerical assessment can be used to evaluate the hazards posed by water flow to workers, which meets the urgent demands of water-disaster management for underground mines.