History Of Mine Ventilation

By Pulkit Jain, 29th Jul 2012 | Follow this author | RSS Feed | Short URL http://nut.bz/40ro-55h/
Posted in Wikinut>Reviews>Books>Education

Mine Requires Ventilation for its perfect working.
here is the history how mine ventilation was setup.

Mine Ventilation

Observations of the movements of air in underground passages have a long and fascinating
history.Archaeological investigations at Grimes Graves in England have shown that
early flint miners built brushwood fires at the working faces unaware of the ability of fire to promote airflow which was later rediscovered by the Greeks, the Romans,
in medieval Europe and during the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

The Laurium silver mines of Greece, operating in 600 B.C. have layouts which reveal that the Greek miners were conscious of the need for a connected ventilating circuit. At least two airways served each major section of the mine and there is evidence that divided shafts were used to provide separate air intake and return connections to surface. Underground mines of the Roman Empire often had twin shafts, and Pliny (23-79 A.D.) describes how slaves used palm fronds to waft air along tunnels.

The first great textbook on mining,written in Latin by Georgius Agricola, showed ventilating methods that included diverting surface winds into the
mouths of shafts, wooden centrifugal fans powered by men and horses, bellows for auxiliary ventilation and air doors.

From the 17th Century onwards, papers began to be presented to the Royal Society of the United Kingdom on the horrific mine conditions.Ventilation was induced either by purely natural effects, stagnating when air temperatures on the surface and underground were near equal, or by fire.The first ventilating furnaces of that era were
built on surface but it was soon realized that burning coals suspended in a wire basket within the upcast shaft gave improved ventilation. Furthermore, the lower the basket, the better the effect.This quickly led to the construction of shaft bottom furnaces.
A common method of removing methane was to send a "fireman'' in before each shift, covered in sackcloths dowsed in water and carrying a candle on the end of a long rod to burn out the methane before the miners went into the working faces.

The quest for a safe form of illumination went on through the eighteenth century.One of the more serious attempts was the steel flint mill invented in 1733 by Carlisle Spedding, a well known mining engineer.This device relied upon a piece of flint being held against a rapidly revolving steel wheel that was driven through a gear mechanism by a manually rotated handle. The complete device was strapped to the chest of a boy whose job was to produce a continuous shower of sparks in order to provide some illumination for the work place of a miner.

After a horrific explosion at Felling, Gateshead killed 92 miners in 1812 contact was made with Sir Humphrey Davy, President of the Royal Society, for assistance in developing a safe lamp.This lead to The Davy Lamp.He found that the flame of burning methane would not readily pass through a closely woven wire mesh.The lamp glowed 'red hot' because of the methane burning vigourously within it, yet the flames could not pass through the wire mesh to ignite the surrounding firedamp.

The greatest classical paper on mine ventilation was one entitled "On the Theory of the Ventilation of Mines", presented by John Job Atkinson to the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers in December, 1854.During Atkinson's productive years the first power driven ventilators began to appear. These varied from enormous steam-driven piston and cylinder devices to elementary centrifugal fans. The years around the turn of the century saw working conditions in mines coming under legislative control.The nineteen twenties saw further accelerated research in several countries. Improved
instrumentation allowed organized ventilation surveys to be carried out to measure airflows and pressure drops for the purposes of ventilation planning.Atkinson's theory was confirmed in practice. The first successful axial fans were introduced in about 1930./*In 1943, Professor F.Baden Hinsley produced another classical paper advancing understanding of the behaviour of airflow by using thermodynamic analyses. Hinsley also supervised the work at Nottingham University that led to the first practical use of analog computers in 1952 to facilitate ventilation planning. This technique was employed widely and successfully for over a decade. The development of ventilation network analysis programs for digital computers in the early sixties rendered the analog devices obsolete.However, the nineteen eighties saw a shift to desktop computers and corresponding programs were developed. This is now the dominant method used for ventilation planning.

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Meet the author

Pulkit Jain
B.TECH 2nd year
Indian Institute of Technology
BHU
Varanasi
i use to write about technology, education system and relationships
you can also find my writings on www.expertscolumn.com