Respirable coal mine dust represents a serious health hazard for miners. Monitoring methods are needed that enable fractionation of into its primary components, and do so in real time. Near the production face, simple capability to monitor versus mineral fractions would be highly valuable tracking changes sources—and supporting timely responses terms controls or other interventions reduce expos...

The goal of this thesis is to design algorithms that run with better complexity when compiling or parallelizing loop programs. The framework within which our algorithms operate is the polyhedral model of compilation which has been successful in the design and implementation of complex loop nest optimizers and parallelizing compilers. The algorithmic complexity and scalability limitations of the...

The distribution of ground-water radiocarbon ages from the Tertiary limestone aquifer (includes the Floridan aquifer) in South Carolina shows both a typical trend for a regional sedimentary aquifer plus a lesscommonly reported occurrence of disjunct outliers of recharging and thus high vulnerability to contamination located farther down the regional flow system. The main recharge area, and thus...

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The objective in this case is not only to be realistic, but also to provide new and intelligible ways of model representation. This raises new issues in data perception. The question of perception of complex data, especially regarding visual feedback, is an open question, and it is the subject of this work. This PhD thesis studied the human perception in Immersive Virtual Environments of comple...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether the prevalence of coal workers' pneumoconiosis (CWP) or progressive massive fibrosis (PMF) among United States underground miners is associated with mine size. METHODS We examined chest radiographs from 1970 to 2009 of working miners who participated in the National Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program for the presence of small and large opacities consistent...

In all over the world, mining is considered as a high-risk activity that is pregnant with serious disasters not only for miners, engineers, and other people into it, but also for people who live near the mines. In this article, our main purpose is to examine some major mine disasters and safety in mines and the case study is a coal mine in Turkey. Safety in mines is one of the most important is...

The collapse of abandoned room-and-pillar mines is often violent and unpredictable. Safety concerns often resulted in mine closures with no post-mining stability evaluations. As a result, large amounts of land resources over room-and-pillar mines are wasted. This paper attempts to establish an understanding of the long-term stability issues of goafs (abandoned mines). Considering progressive pi...

A hybrid technique is presented that simultaneously uses both electromagnetic and acoustic waves in a synergistic manner to detect buried land mines. The system consists of an electromagnetic radar and an acoustic source. The acoustic source causes both the mine and the surface of the earth to be displaced. The electromagnetic radar is used to detect these displacements and, thus, the mine. To ...

Mountaintop mining is the dominant form of coal mining and the largest driver of land cover change in the central Appalachians. The waste rock from these surface mines is disposed of in the adjacent river valleys, leading to a burial of headwater streams and dramatic increases in salinity and trace metal concentrations immediately downstream. In this synoptic study we document the cumulative im...