Monitoring
Lightning strikes may penetrate deep underground, putting a mine’s integrity into question.
Managing risks of lightning strikes and air quality TWO RESPECTED UNITED STATES SCHOLARS WILL CONDUCT RESEARCH ON LIGHTNING STRIKES AND AIR QUALITY INSIDE MINES AT CURTIN UNIVERSITY. VANESSA ZHOU WRITES.
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lot of research on mine safety has been focused on sensors, the Internet of Things and data analytics, but lightning strikes and air quality inside mines will be the target of two leading scientists from the United States next year. Tall mine structures, such as headframes are, indeed, preferred places for lightning to strike. While a headframe itself is assumed to be as robust, lightning currents have been shown by researchers to penetrate deep underground, according to New Mexico Tech Professor and former Silicon Valley engineer Richard Sonnenfeld. In the United States, methane explosions in coal mines have been shown to be triggered by sparks that were induced by surface lightning. But the phenomenon of lightning attachment – the technical term that addresses the basic question of ‘How
does a lightning flash know what to hit?’ – is not well understood, leading to the impossibility to engineer better lightning protection solutions. “Much work is empirical, (though) modern instruments have the potential to illuminate this important subject. … I hope to observe the headframes in Kalgoorlie under thunderstorm conditions,” Sonnenfeld tells Safe to Work. Sonnenfeld and mining and metallurgical engineering academic George Danko, from the University of Nevada, will conduct research at Curtin University next year under the Fulbright program. The initiative was established in 1949 through a binational treaty between the Australian and United States Governments, resulting in the award of about 100 scholarships each year. Danko, on the other hand, will meet with Australian partners to develop
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methods for improving mine safety and health related to hazardous atmospheric conditions in mines. By using real-time condition monitoring, evaluation and control, the methods will target early recognition of hazards produced by natural or operational causes, allowing for preventative interventions in advance. “The rapidly shrinking workforce in modern mines and the diminishing human feedback may create new problems in manual safety examinations in the USA and worldwide,” Danko says. “It is necessary to rely on the application of monitoring sensor networks and automatic evaluation of the signal streams for worrisome trends with fewer humans in the loop.” The ever stricter regulations for safety and health will also require automatic monitoring and evaluation, highlighting the benefits of an early warning system (EWS) technology.
