Wireless ventilation control for large-scale systems : The mining industrial case

Abstract

Mining ventilation is an interesting example of a large scale system with high environmental impact where advanced control strategies can bring major improvements. Indeed, one of the first objectives of modern mining industry is to fulfill environmental specifications [1] during the ore extraction and crushing, by optimizing the energy consumption or the production of polluting agents. The mine electric consumption was 4 % of total industrial electric demand in the US in 1994 (6 % in 2007 in South Africa) and 90 % of it was related to motor system energy [2]. Another interesting figure is given in [3] where it is estimated that the savings associated with global control strategies for fluid systems (pumps, fans and compressors) represent approximately 20 % of the total manufacturing motor system energy savings. This motivates the development of new control strategies for large scale aerodynamic processes based on appropriate automation and a global consideration of the system. More specifically, the challenge in this work is focused on the mining ventilation since as much as 50 % or more of the energy consumed by the mining process may go into the ventilation (including heating the air). It is clear that investigating automatic control solutions and minimizing the amount of pumped air to save energy consumption (proportional to the cube of airflow quantity [4]) is of great environmental and industrial interest.

Publication
In 2009 6th IEEE Annual Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks Workshops

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