Development And Application Of A Multi-Period, Time-Dependent Ventilation Network Analyzer - Introduction

One of the primary areas of computer application in mine ventilation has been the analysis of mine ventilation networks. A variety of network analyzers that are aimed toward the solution of flows in a given network has been developed. These programs typically use the Hardy Cross or other iterative algorithm for solution of any network, even those that are complex. The computer software has become more efficient and sophisticated over time and has thus been widely adopted for ventilation network analysis. One of the shortcomings of these programs is that they have been developed with the idea of analyzing the ventilation requirements at a single point in the lifetime of a mine. This provides the ventilation engineer with an important tool for analysis but falls somewhat short of providing a convenient means to economically com- pare alternative methods for ventilating a mine. The program described in this paper provides such a tool. The principal concepts that were necessary for the completion of a computer program that analyzes ventilation alternatives is the capability of efficiently determining the ventilation requirements at a variety of times during the lifetime of the ventilation system and some method of analyzing the costs of the alternatives on a realistic comparative basis. To accomplish this task, the authors began using Penn State's mine ventilation simulator designated as PSU/MVS, Didyk et al. (1977a, 1977b) and added the necessary additional software to accommodate the need for multi-period, time-dependent analysis of the net- work. The software was then tested on a coal mine ventilation problem with a 23-year life. The problem points out the value of such a program for ventilation analysis.