Monitoring and control of underground ventilation systems using VUMA-network

Ventilation conditions in mines must be monitored to ensure safe and healthy conditions. However, the multiplicity of ventilation branches and equipment make it impractical to automate measurement of parameters all over a mine. It is more practical to monitor a few critical measurements that are fully reliable and extrapolate to ‘predict’ remaining conditions using ventilation network software. In the past, predictions made by VUMA-network have been verified against manual measurements and these have given confidence in predicted conditions in the remainder of the circuit. The paper describes work being undertaken to link the simulator with monitoring systems to enable accurate predictions of conditions in areas not covered by instrumentation. Information from a monitoring system will be linked to an existing network file. The measured and predicted data will be compared with predictions and verified predictions will be used to examine conditions in areas without instrumentation. Potentially unsafe situations will be highlighted and operators alerted to rectify the situation. be highlighted and operators can be alerted to carry out pre-determined tasks to rectify the situation. This system diagnostic tool will be tested towards the end of 2003 in conjunction with a deep hot gold mine monitoring system. Obviously, there is future potential for control functions to be automatically carried out. Future work will also examine the possibility of identifying locations/sources of differences and extracting reasons for the differences from a knowledge base.