The need for improved worker safety training programmes, as a means to reduce accidents in South African mines, is being emphasized by all industry stakeholders and driven by legislation1. Accident statistics (cf. Table I) highlight the need to address falls of ground as the primary safety hazard in underground (gold) mining operations2. The high incidence of accidents and fatalities in the Sou...

With the demand for green mining in coal mines, filling is becoming more and popular, resulting complex production systems potential safety hazards. Therefore, it very important to evaluate of mines propose improvement measures. Aiming at evaluation method this paper innovatively proposes a based on entropy weight–attribute mathematical theory, which enriches theoretical research related model ...

A mine shaft is the lifeline to underground mines. Mine operators depend on safe, uninterrupted, and efficient movement of workers and materials. The shaft and hoisting system provides access to the network of openings used to recover the underground resource, provides vertical transport of miners and materials, and serves as an escapeway in case of an emergency. Accidents involving hoisting ca...

There is no doubt that vehicle operators of heavy equipment have to accomplish difficult tasks. The increase in mine productivity has led to a proportional increase in equipment size. Most vehicles have considerable blind spots, due to scale alone. Combine normal variations in environmental conditions, in-vehicle management systems, navigation systems and radio communications; the most experien...

Marginal Fisher Analysis (MFA) is a novel dimensionality reduction algorithm. However, the two nearest neighborhood parameters are difficult to select when constructing graphs. In this paper, we propose a nonparametric method called Marginal Discriminant Projection (MDP) which can solves the problem of parameters selection in MFA. Experiment on several benchmark datasets demonstrated the effect...

Underground mines are a special type of environment which requires significant attention since they directly relate to miners‟ productivity, health and safety. With coal or ore exploitation into deep underground mine environments, high temperature and humidity creates risks because of large amounts of heat generated from geothermal heat, mining machines, groundwater and mine water. There have b...

Fault tree analysis is a systematic safety analysis tool that proceeds deductively from the occurrence of an undesired event (accident) to the identification of the root causes of that event. One recurring mine safety problem—a dozer falling into a void over a drawpoint on a coal surge pile—was analyzed using available, inexpensive fault tree programs on a personal computer. The analysis identi...

Modern mining is the process of exploiting minerals from the earth to derive profits. Realtime optimization for plant-wide production has been implemented in the process industry; however, these systems have not yet been implemented for mine-wide production in the mining industry, particularly for underground mines. Real-time control systems have been applied to a few unit operations (e.g. conv...

Mining has been characterized by most researchers as one of the most hazardous occupations amongst major industrial activities. Despite regulations, automation and increased attention towards reducing risks through safety campaigns, the mining industry is still associated with higher rates of injuries compared with other industries. Mine workers must deal with a number of subtly harmful risks t...

In advance longwall mining, the safety of mine network, production rate, and consequently, economic conditions of a mine are dependent on the stability conditions of gate roadways. The gate roadway stability is a function of two important factors: 1) characteristics of the excavation damaged zone (EDZ) above the gate roadway and 2) loading effect due to the caving zone (CZ) above the longwall w...