Recommendations for methane prognostics and adjustment of short-term prevention measures based on methane hazard levels in coal mine longwalls

Faculty of Mining, Safety Engineering and Industrial Automation, Department of Mining, Silesian University of Technology, Poland

Abstract

The article describes the recommended procedure for conducting methane forecasts and selection of the methane prevention measures that adequately reflect the level of risk of methane combustion and explosion. The appropriate selection of measures to prevent methane exposure can be effective at mitigating the exposure risk of the miners and other mine employees. Implementation of these measures can have the additional benefit of increasing mine output and efficiency. For example, prediction of methane concentrations can reduce the instances of unplanned equipment downtime to maintain mine safety and integrity. The presented procedure is the culmination of extensive research on three predictive models of short-term average methane concentrations. Identifying the advantages and disadvantages of the models became possible by verifying the models against a nearly 500-day dataset obtained from 7 longwalls with identified significant methane content. Furthermore, selected studies were presented based on one of the datasets obtained from the U-ventilated longwall.