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As the depth of mines, production rates, rated power of diesel fleets and cost of electricity increases, the need for strategic ventilation planning is becoming increasingly important.
Mines are pursuing ore bodies at incredible depths and this introduces ventilation challenges. Some of these challenges include energy management, air quantity requirements and thermal conditions. The Centre for Mining Technology (CMT), MIRARCO, has embarked on creating strategic ventilation tools that analyze gross ventilation requirements and thermal conditions in combination with scheduling data. The results to date have shown that a strategic ventilation planning can have a positive influence on company financials and environmental impact.
MIRARCO has developed strategic ventilation planning tools that use existing mine schedules to determine volumetric requirements and thermal conditions at any point in time within a mine model. MIRARCO is working with BESTECH to develop an Automated Ventilation Scheduler (AVS) that is able to control main ventilation infrastructure and potentially the entire ventilation infrastructure. The integration of these two components would allow a mine to determine and manage volumetric requirements and fan operating duties based on the scheduled production requirements. This would lead to large energy savings and potentially increased quality of the working environment.
Master's students are sought to develop the methodology for minimising ventilation requirements for a given sequence of rock excavation processes (i.e. determine ventilation requirements from existing mine schedules and then optimise the rock excavation processes to produce mining activities with the minimum ventilation demand.
They will develop a thorough knowledge of ventilation practices and utilise optimisation techniques developed at MIRARCO and apply these to ventilation design and control through the following specific tasks:
- Identify ventilation needs from mine schedules for different case studies.
- Develop appropriate optimisation strategies such that the minimum ventilation requirement can be identified for any given sequence of mining activities. This will utilise an interface between MIRARCO's optimization capability, the calculation of heat and ventilation requirements and commercially available energy management software.
- Generate a methodology for primary ventilation circuit fan control to save energy costs for a mine.
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