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Remote sensing methods have been used to evaluate vegetative growth patterns for many applications, though relatively little work has focused on tracking mine reclamation progress. For coal mines in Central Appalachia, reclamation approaches that include production of biofuel feedstocks are increasingly attractive, as these may yield significant post-mining land values and contribute to carbon-neutral energy supplies. To optimize productivity, the influence of reclamation parameters must be well understood ? which necessitates tracking biomass production over long time periods. Satellite-based estimations may offer low-cost alternatives to conventional biomass appraisals, and also the potential to provide critical input for carbon accounting at varied spatial scales. In this paper, we use biomass production experimental plots on reclaimed mine sites established by the Powell River Project (PRP) for a comparative study between satellite measurements of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and inventory estimates of biomass under a variety of conditions. The PRP is a unique public-private partnership in the coalfields of southwestern Virginia dedicated to enhancing beneficial use and environmental protection of mined lands.

Feb 27, 2013

The state of the tunneling and underground construction industry and the advancements of the industry?s biggest machines were the main topics at the 2008 edition of the UCA of SME?s annual George A. Fox Conference. This year SME hosted more than 250 tunneling and under-ground construction professionals at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. During the morning session of the long-running one-day conference, attendees heard a state of the industry through the annual Home-town Update where it was evident that the industry is doing well. Michael McHugh of Moretrench cruised through the many projects that are under way along the Eastern seaboard of the United States and said he could have gone longer if time allowed. An example of how well things are going for the industry is a look at New York, where the industry is flourishing. The New York City Water Tunnel # 3 project is a $668 million project that was awarded to Schiavone/Shea/Frontier Kemper joint venture in 2004. McHugh said that mining on the project was completed in August 2006 and that all con-tract work is expected to be completed by August 2009. The Second Ave. Subway is a $337-million twin tunnel project that will connect upper Manhattan with the financial district. This is a four-phase project. McHugh said the Metropolitan Transit Authority obtained full funding in 2007 and construction awards will be awarded during the next two years. The No. 7 Line Flushing extension, a five-year, $1.15- billion project that will redevelop the Hudson Yards area of Midtown West and the New York City Water Tunnel No. 3 project is the largest capital construction project in New York City?s history. McHugh said the project was given notice to proceed on Dec. 13, 2007. The project includes three large shafts, two parallel 6.7 m (22 ft) tunnels at 2,000 liner m (6,500 liner ft), one large cross adit, one large underground rock cavern station with two interlocks and eight penetrations. These were just a few of projects mentioned in the Hometown Projects update.

Jan 1, 2008

By Richard Weinstein, Richard Snoby

There are many advantages to upgrading coal with dry jigging technology. The most obvious is the lack of process water, which eliminates the need for fines dewatering and slurry confinement. Dry jigging eliminates the clean coal moisture penalty associated with wet processing. Particulate emissions are virtually nonexistent due to inclusions of fabric dust collectors on all modern dry jig plants. Because of the environmentally friendly nature of dry jig plants, installation permits are often measured in days, not months. There has also been a fundamental advance in dry jigging efficiency. All of these advantages have renewed the coal industry’s interest in dry jigging. But air jigging is not right for every application. There are limitations due to particle size, particle shape, moisture and near gravity content. This article explores the evolution of dry jigging. It reviews parameters important for determining the suitability of dry jigging. It also compares historical performance data as measured by imperfection, against results from modern dry jigging technology. The article also presents data from modern dry jig installations.

Jan 1, 2007

By J. L. Carr

Continuous mining machines are extensively used in the underground coal mining industry. These machines are typically remote-controlled, and severe injuries and fatalities occur every year when a miner is struck or pinned by the machine. Proximity detection systems offer a means to prevent these types of injuries and fatalities by sensing the presence of a miner and disabling machine motion. Researchers at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)have developed the Intelligent Proximity Detection (iPD) system to provide enhanced protection while minimizing false alarms. The iPD system uses a set of pre-defined rules to determine which machine motions are safe and which would present a potential hazard, and automatically disables only the potentially hazardous motions. This system has been installed and tested on a Joy 14CM continuous mining machine at the NIOSH Office of Mine Safety and Health Research in Pittsburgh. Under laboratory conditions, the achievable accuracy and performance of the iPD system has been quantified with respect to a number of variables including position of the conveyor boom, presence of the machine?s trailing cable, and orientation of the miner-wearable component. Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Reference to specific brand names does not imply endorsement by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

Feb 27, 2013

By L. B. Hales

Expert control of grinding and flotation plants has been successfully used in the minerals industry since the 1970?s. The earliest of these systems were written in a hard-coded fashion in FORTRAN, BASIC or Pascal. Second generation systems were built using the first experimental expert system shells that were being developed in the artificial intelligence community. Later systems were deployed in expert systems designed for real-time processing plants that also include the ability to model the process with neural network models and optimize setpoint selection through the use of genetic algorithms. [1,2] In spite of the fact that significant performance increases have been achieved using these systems they are not perfect and can be improved. They suffer from the static nature of their rules and to a degree the process models. There is an opportunity to further increase system performance by systematically taking advantage of the tremendous amount of data produced by the expert system to improve the design, the heuristic rules, the model topologies and the use of the models. Data mining refers to extracting or mining knowledge from large amounts of data where the objective is to automatically analyze, classify and summarize the data to automatically discover and characterize trends in it and to automatically flag anomalies. [3] Clearly, modern process control systems are capable of collecting vast amounts of data. Without a doubt, these data contain important information on the operation of our plants and their ultimate optimization. Coupling the information mined from these data with Expert Control Systems should produce more effective control and greater knowledge of the grinding process and the flotation process. Now, with the advent of effective monitoring of entire minerals plant electric consumption it is possible to not only optimize plant production in real-time it is possible to analyze total plant electrical consumption and incorporate it into the plant control logic thereby improving the overall plant economic performance. This is particularly important with the ever more complex power contracts that plants operate under.

Jan 1, 2012

By Hyung-woo Kim, Kiyoung Sung, Sup Hong, Jung-Yeul Jung

Many concepts for the commercial production of deep-seabed manganese nodules have been studied since the 1970s. However, the bearing capacity of the deep seabed is not strong because it is composed of fine particles with high moisture content. So it is impossible to carry manganese nodules in the collection system. Therefore, the validity of continuous mining by riser pipe from the seabed to the vessel is highly appreciated. A continuous mining system is composed of mining vessel, lifting pipe, buffer system, transport tube (flexible pipe), and self-propelled mining robot. A conceptual diagram of this system is shown in Fig. 1(a). Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering (KRISO) developed a deep-seabed self-propelled mining robot called "MineRo" to collect manganese nodules in 2012 (as shown in Fig. 1(b)). In 2013, real sea experiments at around 1380 m depth were carried out to evaluate the collecting and driving performance of MineRo. However, we found that the roller in MineRo did not work well at times. To elucidate the problem, we analyzed the rheological characteristics between the bushing and drive shaft under deep-water conditions.

Sep 1, 2014

This study was conducted to determine the effects of a machine-mounted scrubber and water sprays on face methane levels. Testing was conducted in the NIOSH ventilation test gallery which was designed to simulate a full-scale mine entry. In the test entry, a model mining machine, equipped with water sprays and a simulated dust scrubber, was located at the face of a 20-ft box cut. Blowing ventilation was provided using a curtain with a 40-ft setback distance. Methane released from a pipe manifold located inby the mining machine was monitored at six locations that were 1 ft outby the pipe manifold. Tests were first conducted to evaluate the effects of using sprays and scrubber separately on face methane levels. Additional tests were conducted to determine how a scrubber used with various water spray systems would affect face methane levels. The use of either sprays or scrubber reduced face methane levels significantly. The combined use of sprays with the scrubber further reduced face methane levels a small amount. Primarily the sprays affected methane levels by changing airflow distribution close to the face.

Jan 1, 2001

By H. Polat, Q. Hu, S. Chander

The collection efficiency of dust particles was determined in a laboratory dust chamber equipped with a water spray. Measurements were made in the presence of selected nonionic, cationic and anionic surfactants. For the nonionic and the anionic reagents, efficiency was maximum in a narrow range of concentration. The surfactant concentration corresponding to high collection efficiency was usually much below the commonly used concentration of l%, however. In comparison, much higher collection efficiency was observed for a cationic surfactant at extremely low concentrations. For delineating the mechanism of capture of dust particles, surface tension and contact angle results were used to obtain a correlation between the work of adhesion and the efficiency of collection. Such a correlation was reasonable for the nonionic surfactants but not for charged surfactants. In the latter case, electrostatic interactions between charged droplets and particles were more important, especially for the cationic reagent.

Jan 1, 1992

By P. A. Hagerty

Biological treatment of metals-impacted water using sulfate reduction is a viable means of treatment that has been applied in pilot and full scale at numerous projects. One of the fundamental challenges with this type of treatment is the selection of an appropriate substrate to support the sulfate reduction process long-term. The substrate degradation products provide a carbon source and an electron donor for metabolism by sulfate-reducing bacteria and consequently organic characteristics are critical; however, the physical attributes of the substrate are equally critical to an efficient and optimized substrate mix. This paper explores the affect of particle size (a.k.a. grain size) of several substrate mixes on the treatment efficiency of sulfate reducing treatment systems. Substrate selection can be separated into two phases of evaluation, the primary selection phase and the secondary optimization phase. The primary selection phase considers such fundamental attributes as source availability, economics, bioavailability and longevity. These fundamental activities are conducted in order to identify potential candidate ingredients of the substrate mix which are regionally available, economically viable and consistent with the biogeochemical aspects of the project. Recent work has been conducted in the development of testing protocol for organic substrates to quantify bioavailability (Martinez Hernandez et al. 2010, Place et al. 2006) as part of the primary selection phase. Once the substrate ingredients have been selected based on the primary criteria, the mixture of these ingredients is then developed based on an optimization process, including consideration of the substrate ingredient?s particle size distribution.

Jan 1, 2011

By D. Earley

High metal prices and new world trade standards and accounting for environmental liability in financial disclosures are creating markets for metals commodities that are produced using ?green technologies?. A promising "green" gold leaching system uses a polysulfide based lixiviant which is non-toxic and non-polluting. Laboratory testing has demonstrated selective gold extraction rates comparable to those of cyanide. The polysulfide lixiviant is a dilute aqueous solution which can be inexpensively produced from readily available chemical reagents and even mining wastes. The reagent system is self-buffering and maintains the optimal chemical environment for leaching. Treatment of residual leach solutions is not necessary because the lixiviant itself is not toxic, and breaks down as the system equilibrates. Simple closed system boiling is used to recover gold from process solutions. The polysulfide lixiviant can then be readily renewed and recycled back into the system, forming a closed loop system that conserves reagents and energy which minimizes operating costs. Economic projections have shown that the system can be used profitably for standard ore types and grades.

Jan 1, 2009

By T. Freeman

In the past ten years, the Geotechnical Baseline Report (GBR) has arguably become the key document for tunnel construction. This report not only allocates much of the risk involved with the work, it serves as the basis for bid preparation and is used extensively in resolving disputes during construction. This paper discusses some important issues related to the GBR and presents suggestions for improving these vital reports.

By A. López-Valdivieso, M. A. Corona-Arroyo, M. Llamas-Bueno

Magnetite (Fe3O4) ore is concentrated by low-magnetic-field drums to recover a magnetite concentrate that is low in silica (SiO2). The presence of SiO2 in the magnetite concentrate for steel production increases the steel processing costs, so a major challenge in magnetic concentration is to lower the SiO2 grade in the Fe concentrate. This work presents studies that were carried out on the removal of SiO2 from the magnetite concentration at the plant scale. Studies were performed with a three 36 × 96″ drum unit processing 46 ton/h of rougher magnetite concentrate. These studies showed that silica appears in the magnetite concentrate by three mechanisms, namely SiO2 entrainment in Fe3O4 chains, heterocoagulation between Fe3O4 and SiO2 particles, and mineral locking of SiO2 to Fe3O4. The SiO2 entrainment mechanism had the highest contribution (75%) to the SiO2 recovered in the Fe concentrate. Electrokinetic studies on Fe3O4 and SiO2 showed that heterocoagulation occurs because of the low negative zeta potential of the minerals at the pH of the plant slurry. This study also showed that a high percentage of ultrafine size SiO2 particles trapped in Fe3O4 agglomerates was not removed by the dilution water for the slurry fed to the drum. To lower the SiO2 recovery in the drum magnetic concentration process, work should be directed towards the removal of trapped SiO2 in Fe3O4 agglomerates.

By F. Freme

Coal production in the United States in 2008 reached a record level of 1.06 Gt (1,171.5 million st), according to preliminary data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) (Table 1). This is an increase of 2.2 percent, or 22.5 Mt (24.8 million st) above the 2007 level and 7.9 Mt (8.7 million st) above the prior record level set in 2006. Although coal production was higher in 2008, U.S. total coal consumption decreased in all sectors for the year. Coal consumption in the electric power sector in 2008 was lower by 0.3 percent, while coking coal consumption decreased by 2.8 percent and the other industrial sector declined by 3.7 percent. The commercial and institutional sector, that had been called the ?residential and commercial? sector prior to 2008, declined by 0.6 percent in 2008. It is the smallest of all the coal-consuming sectors. (Note: All percent-age change calculations are done at the short-tons level.) U.S. coal exports were significantly higher in 2008, while coal imports decreased during the year. Total coal stocks increased in 2008, as some consumers added to their stockpiles. The coal synfuel industry, which grew throughout most of this decade, disappeared from the scene due to the expiration of the available federal tax credits at the end of 2007. The decline in coal consumption during the year was the consequence of slowing domestic economic growth, particularly in the latter half of the year, combined with the weather conditions in 2008, resulting in lower demand for electricity. Preliminary data show that total generation in the electric power sector (electric utilities and independent power producers, including useful thermal output) in the U.S. decreased in 2008. Coal-based generation also decreased, resulting in a 3.2-Mt (3.5-mil-lion st) drop in coal consumed in the electric power sec-tor. Coal use in the non-electricity sector decreased by 3.3 percent to a level of 72.6 Mt (80.1 million st). The international coal markets in 2008 were the driv-

Jan 1, 2009

By William D. Leech, Ronald E. Romley, Gary N. Sheppard

The Price Road Drainage Tunnel was constructed for the Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) in 1988 and 1989 to provide surface water drainage for the proposed outer Loop Highway (SR 117). The 5.4 km (3 mile) long, 6.6 m (22 ft) excavated diameter tunnel was driven through sand, gravel and cobbles utilizing an open face digger shield. Precast concrete segments were erected for initial ground support. A second-pass reinforced concrete final lining was placed, which was followed by contact grouting. This paper will consider the owner's representatives' view of the effectiveness of using precast concrete segments for this project. Topics discussed include segment design and erection, ground support, geotechnical instrumentation, segment erection verses contact grout interactions and tunnel production.

Jan 1, 1991

By Wern-ping Chen

To mitigate and control the combined sewer over-flows from 17 outfalls in Detroit, MI, three outfalls in Dearborn Heights, MI and eight outfalls in Redford Township MI, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) completed the preliminary design of a storage tunnel in 2005. In 2006, a final design revised the alignments and the inside diameter (ID) of the tunnel. The revised tunnel system includes an 11.28-km (7-mile) 9.14-m (30-ft) ID tunnel, a 24.4-m (80-ft) ID pump station, two work shafts about 15.2-m (50-ft) ID each and 14 drop shafts with various IDs. A small portion of combined sanitary and storm sewers serve the majority of the Rouge Valley water-shed. This includes Detroit, MI and most of the western suburbs. The Northwest Interceptor (NWI), that extends between Eight Mile Road and Ford Road and roughly parallel to the Rouge River, intercepts sanitary sewage and some wet weather flows from trunk sewers in the tributary areas for transport to the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) for treatment. During extreme storm events, when the capacity of the NWI is exceeded, the excess combined sewer and overflow (CSO) over-flows into the Rouge River through 17 outfalls to local rivers. The purpose of the Upper Rouge Tunnel system (URT) is to capture and significantly reduce the uncontrolled CSO from these 17 outfalls in Detroit, three outfalls in Dearborn Heights and eight outfalls in Redford Township. When implemented, the

Jan 1, 2007

By Richard R. Klimpel

Introduction Froth flotation is one of the most common unit engineering operations in use today. Its aim is to upgrade the quality of coal by removing ash/pyrite and separating selected minerals from undesired gangue materials. Flotation has been successfully practiced at the industrial scale for more than 50 years. Its use is increasing due to the ever decreasing feed grades of the coals and minerals being processed. Flotation has also shown itself to be a flexible process that lends itself well to many solid/solid separations. Thus, with surprisingly little equipment modification, separations can involve very different particle sizes and densities, and relative weight ratios of materials to be separated. In addition, the flotation process is economic, especially when compared to size reduction, its associated precursor process. Flotation also lends itself to continuous operations with a given equipment configuration. The operation must exhibit an ability to vary feed rate of solid to the process by as much as 50% without a total collapse of separating efficiency. In addition, the mechanical flotation cell is scaleable from 2.8 to 57 or 85 m3 (100 to 2000 or 3000 cu ft) with surprising ease relative to other unit engineering operations over the same relative size increase. The separating medium used is water. Most of the chemicals required - pH regulators, frothers, collectors, activators, and depressants - are all relatively inexpensive and common. They are not usually used in large quantities. Froth flotation is certainly one of the most versatile and forgiving unit operations in the chemical, mining, and agricultural industries. The problem with the industrial flotation process is that it is fairly easy to get reasonable results and relatively difficult to get excellent results. Why is it so difficult to fine tune the froth flotation process? There are some obvious reasons and a few not-so-obvious factors. The obvious category would certainly contain the tendency of natural feed materials (ores and raw coals) to have variable physical, metallurgical, and surface properties. This occurs even when special care is taken to minimize such differences with blending. There is another obvious reason for difficulty. An inherent broadness of the feed particle size range to flotation results from using any of the common industrial-scalefine grinding devices - ball-, rod-, or autogenous mills. Research has been done into the chemical reagent and equipment aspects of flotation. It has shown strong interactions (limitations) of chemical reagents and equipment on larger and smaller particles. The point is that current flotation practice works best on average- or medium-sized feed particles. The greater the amount of large or small particles, or of both large and small, the more difficult it is to achieve excellent flotation results. Other reasonably obvious factors include: • variations in mineral type and liberation sizes; • water chemistry variations such as those involving Ca", C03, or Fe", or various soluble metal cations; • the presence of stray organic materials such as returning soluble reagents or partially degraded reagents in reuse water; • the lack of reliable on-line instrumentation for monitoring and control; • frequent equipment malfunctions of all types; • excessive feed rates for installed plant capacity; • poor operator interaction with the process; and • poor reagent dosage control. There are less obvious, but real limitations to flotation. These are inherent in the design and operating characteristics of the most common cell design in use today - the mechanical flotation cell. Individual performance attributes of the chemical reagents used, along with their manner of use, also carry limitations. The bulk of this paper will deal with chemical reagents and their use. Chemical reagents In 1979, the author and his co-workers were asked to invent and implement, at the industrial scale, new flotation reagent chemistry. After reviewing some of the literature (Sutherland and Wark, 1955; Klassen and Mokrousov, 1959; M. Fuerstenau, 1962; D. Fuerstenau, 1976; and Leja, 1982), a series of carefully controlled plant scale tests were set up. These tests were designed to understand existing reagent scale-up from the laboratory to the plant. They were to quantify at the plant level the effect of some of the more important, controllable chemical reagent factors (frother and collector type, frother and collector dosage, pH effects). This is a learning experience that all researchers involved in flotation theory should experience. It quickly became apparent that: • because a factor is important

Jan 12, 1988

By Peter Campi, Harry R. Asche, Ian P. Callow, Edmund G. Taylor, P. Scott Smith

The US$1,850 million EastLink project is a 39km tollway and includes twin 3-lane,1.5km long, undrained driven tunnels. The hard rock tunnels are being built to avoid passing the motorway through the Mullum Mullum Valley and so to help preserve the unique flora and fauna in the area. This paper describes several of the key issues in the tunnel design and construction, including: the integration of the temporary support design with the Contractor’s tunnel excavation and support procedures, including sharing of responsibility between the Designer and Contractor for support type selection and the production of a project specific rock mass classification system to enable more objective determination of ground conditions. detailed hydrogeological assessments during the design and construction phases to allow confirmation of design loads for the tunnel lining design and the various suite of waterproofing tools in order to meet the project inflow requirements. development of a pre-cast invert solution to the main tunnel secondary lining to enable faster lining construction and to minimize risks to the tunnel membrane associated with fixing reinforcement and construction traffic.

Jan 1, 2007

By D. J. Gilbert

As a preventive action, the geotechnical department at the mine analyzed the original topography overlying a conveyor tunnel at the mine. Several dewatering drains were installed to intercept water collecting from an old lakebed. Subsequently, 20 steel arches were installed to provide additional support in an area of tunnel where original geological mapping indicated Type IV rock. This project was completed ontime with no loss to production. Construction schedules had to be developed to half hour precision, to accommodate the installation.

Jan 1, 2011

By Syd S. Peng

University research in the U.S. consists of three components; faculty, funding, and graduate students or postdoctorals. Individual faculty is the unit area of research that is not limited, although faculty normally performs research in their areas of expertise. Faculty can and often do join with other faculty in multidisciplinary research. Faculty research achievements or reputation reflects the standing of the program and university. Therefore, research is highly encouraged and regarded within the university community. Graduate students are the work force of faculty research and doctoral students are preferred for high-quality products. The federal government provides the majority of funding sources, with the remainder coming from industry, state government and others. Compared with other engineering majors, the mining engineering programs in the U.S. are unique in that they: ? Are small in terms of the number of programs, and number of faculty and students in each program. ? Serve a single industry (i.e., mining) and are thus cyclic, reflecting the up and down economic state of the mineral industries. Enrollment statistics during the past 70 years show that a cycle consists of approximately 30 years with the first 10 years up, followed by 20 years down. ? Have curriculum designed to emphasize and thus serve for either the coal, hardrock or industrial minerals industries. These unique features make mining engineering programs hard to manage in university environments. Funding for mining research has relied primarily on the federal government, i.e., the former U.S. Bureau of Mines (USBM) and currently the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). The mining industry does not directly perform, nor sponsor research projects. Federal funding provides primarily in-house research. In the last four decades, federal extramural funding was only available when Congress appropriated extra funding in response to mine disasters. For instance, a string of coal mine explosions in the mid to late 1960s prompted Congress to enact the Coal Mine Health and Safety Act of 1969. It provided massive research funding from 1970 to 1983 covering all mining-related subject areas. From 1984 to 1995, federal extramural research funding was minimal, through two generic mineral technology research centers for selected mining engineering programs. In 1995, Congress closed the USBM and transferred the health and safety of miners program to NIOSH. Federally-funded extra-mural research practically stopped from 1995 to 2006. In 2006 and 2007, in response to a series of disasters, including those at Sago, Aracoma, Darby and Crandall Canyon, Congress again appropriated funding for short-term re-search in selected subjected areas such as underground tracking and communication, mine seal and ventilation, and deep cover pillar extraction. Therefore, to develop a meaningful academic mining research program during the past three decades, funding needed to be drawn from other sources such as the mining industries. A ?meaningful? program requires a sufficient amount of consistent funding in order to produce effective results. A review of federally funded extramural research pro-grams shows that a great majority of contractors/grantees are private entities, involving few mining engineering faculty. This, in part, is due to the fact that mining engineering involves so many different subjects. Therefore, a small mining engineering program can only have resources to cover teaching in the core subject areas (i.e., extraction, ground control, ventilation and material handling), at best. In this respect, a successful and meaningful academic mining re-search effort requires strong supporting programs such as geology/geophysics, structural (applied) mechanics, material sciences, compute/software application, etc. Therefore, academic mining research had to rely on private sources such as coal companies, in the author?s case, for sustained funding in the past three decades. Relying on funding from coal companies presents several problems. The projects were small and considered routine consulting projects requiring practical answers in a very short time frame. This is not really suitable for academic research, for which the major goal of research is the training of graduate students. These short-term projects vary with time and mines, most of which are driven by U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) or U.S. Office of Surface Mining (OSM) regulations. So sustained funding under such condition requires broad experience of coal mining operations, which is also not well-aligned for academic research where faculty tends to specialize in a narrow field. Consequently, under such a funding environment, it is important to keep in mind how to develop long-term academic research objectives from conducting small short-term consulting projects that require quick solutions. In other words, how to look beyond the quick answers and to develop broader and more fundamental theories applicable to other situations that advance the-state-of-the-art. In order to achieve this objective, faculty must act as the connecting link because graduate students come and go. Faculty must know the detail of each project such that they know what are the important unsolved problems, what to assign to specific graduate students and how to guide the next group of graduate students to continue the development and advance the mining science. Under such funding environments, the most effective way to conduct academic mining research and ensure quality products is to maintain a research group consisting of postdoctoral, PhD, and MS students of various rankings such that the senior ranks can assist in guiding the junior ranks, especially the senior PhD students who are experts in their dissertation research areas. A weekly meeting should be scheduled for the group in which problems encountered in the research are discussed or individuals take turns presenting the progress of their projects. During each meeting, the importance of open discussion on scientific issues must be emphasized. Thus, opinions are encouraged, debated, and rejected or accepted. Students are encouraged to listen to and analyze other points of view. In addition to training of this thought process, the meeting also helps identify the strengths and weakness of each individual. As the subject of research expands over time, the group?s and, thus, the faculty?s research experience broadens. With this approach, companies can get the quick answer they desire from expert research experience and the faculty can engage in meaningful applied and basic research that is most relevant to routine mine operations. The end result is that companies will have a high regard for academic mining research.

Jan 1, 2009

The efficiency of a coal mine ventilation circuit is usually measured by the ratio of the sum of the face quantities divided by the quantity supplied by the fans. Other types of systems use the power delivered to the power supplied to measure efficiency. This paper argues the case that the current measure may be inadequate and that by also looking at the power ratio, ventilation may be better managed. Problems associated with failing ventilation systems would be highlighted earlier so that crisis management could be avoided.

Jan 1, 2009