Wireless gas sensing in South African underground platinum mines

Abstract

Approximately 70% of South African mines are classified as fiery, where methane gas potentially could cause explosions. The number of flammable gas reports and accidents are increasing steadily for both gold and platinum mines. However, there is less awareness of the hazards of methane in hard rock mines (gold and platinum) than in coal mines. Currently, there is no wireless real-time gas sensing system used in South African hard rock mines. The main objective of this work is to investigate the possibility of using a wireless gas detector called GS01 in underground mines. Several experiments have been conducted to evaluate the GS01 performance, accuracy and the ability to communicate in underground mines. The results demonstrate the suitability of using GS01 in such harsh environments. A second motivation for the work was to evaluate the performance of wireless communication using different frequencies.