The facility is located four miles east of Hayden in Routt County, and consists of two BART-eligible boilers. Unit #1 is rated at 190 MW and is dry-bottom, wall-fired. Unit #2 is rated at 275 MW and is tangentially-fired. The Hayden boilers burn Colorado coal that primarily comes from two different mines in northwestern Colorado, the Twenty Mile Mine and the ColoWyo Mine. Coal characteristics a...

For several years, our research group has been developing methods for automated modeling of 3D environments. In September, 2002, we were given the opportunity to demonstrate our mapping capability in an underground coal mine. The opportunity arose as a result of the Quecreek mine accident, in which an inaccurate map caused miners to breach an abandoned, water-filled mine, trapping them for seve...

Belt and King (1945) studied the tissue reactions produced in animals by selected dusts from South Wales coal mines, and found that clean coal (low ash coal fraction containing 99% coal) produced only minimal fibrosis (grade 1) with simple foreign body reaction in 250 to 500 days. In experiments with high ash coal fractions which contained from 37 to 66% coal and about 1 to 3% quartz, the rest ...

Some coal seams in southeast BC are characterized by fine size consist and a moderate amount of inherent ash. Mining strategies and wash plants are designed to handle these coals but sometimes seams are mined, that are unusually difficult to clean. Samples of a number of such coals were acquired and studied. Samples come from a mine and an adjacent property ( samples GC in tables) near Sparwood...

Microbial diversity and abundance in bioaerosols of a coal mine were analyzed based on 454 pyrosequencing and real-time polymerase chain reaction (PCR). A total of 37,191 high quality sequences were obtained and could be classified into 531, 1730 and 448 operational taxonomic units respectively for archaea, bacteria and fungi at 97% sequence similarity. The Shannon diversity index for archaea, ...

Mine roof fall characteristics of 250 falls in 5 different room-and-pillar coal mines, located in Pike, Martin, and Floyd counties, Kentucky, were investigated to determine the relationship of selected parameters associated with roof failure and the assumed condition of the mine roof before failure. The selected parameters used in the study included: presence of cracks and water before the occu...

An underground coal mine medium frequency (MF) communication system generally couples its electromagnetic signals to a long conductor in a tunnel, which acts as a transmission line, and exchanges signals with transceivers along the line. The propagation characteristics of the transmission line, which is usually the longest signal path for an MF communication system, play a major role in determi...