VENTILATION AND CONTAMINANT SIMULATION WITH MULTIFLUX

Abstract

The purpose of the mine ventilation system is to provide sufficient air in quantity to not only support the climate conditions of the mine but most importantly to maintain the oxygen levels in the acceptable range of 19.5 to 23.5 percent. This requires the ventilation system to support enough airflow to dilute the contaminant species in the underground openings and production zones. Although modeling and simulation has significantly helped our designs and assessments of the ventilation systems, there is still a great lack of accuracy in prediction of contaminant transport and their concentration levels due to technological limits and computational capacities. Simulation of gas dispersion and accurately predicting the behavior of contaminant species throughout the mine while keeping the calculations computationally affordable is the subject of this dissertation. In this work a correlation function was established for turbulent dispersion coefficient as a function of the Reynolds number applicable to mine drifts and shafts, and can be used for accurate simulations of gas contaminants in transient conditions in MULTIFLUX software.