INTERPRETATION OF TRANSIENT CAVING DUST PATTERNS DURING SEQUENTIAL CAVING OPERATION IN LTCC FACE

Krishna Tanguturi; Rao Balusu; Johnny Qin; Bharath Belle

doi:10.5937/podrad2501001T

Krishna Tanguturi CSIRO Mineral Resources BU, Mine Safety and Environment Group, QCAT, QLD, Australia, 4069 http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4789-3259
Rao Balusu CSIRO Mineral Resources BU, Mine Safety and Environment Group, QCAT, QLD, Australia, 4069 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5495-8220
Johnny Qin CSIRO Mineral Resources BU, Mine Safety and Environment Group, QCAT, QLD, Australia, 4069 http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5495-8220
Bharath Belle School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, UQ, Australia, 4072; Adjunct Associate Professor http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2467-948X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5937/podrad2501001T

Keywords: Respirable dust, top coal caving, sequential caving

Abstract

Longwall top coal caving (LTCC) is a new mining technology introduced in Australia for enhancing the coal production rate by using the top coal caving operations. Though LTCC mine increase the coal production rates, they are more prone to high dust exposures and can create hazardous conditions for the underground coal mine operators. It is also necessary to introduce better dust control technologies and strategies during LTCC operations. For developing top coal caving dust control strategies, it is necessary first to develop fundamental understanding of transient caving dust flow pattern across the LTCC face. In this paper an attempt is made to predict respirable dust flow patterns during the sequential caving operation using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) techniques. Numerical results predicted dust entering the downstream chock and disperses into the walkway region within 5 seconds of Respirable dust concentrations in the walkway of the first downstream caving chock in sequence caving are above 2mg/m³. Respirable dust concentrations in the walkway of the second downstream caving chock in the sequence and in the further downstream chocks are above 2.5mg/m³ and above.