Advance tools for ventilation and methane emissions control (AVENTO) : final report

AVENTO was a 3-year research project that was aimed at the development of advanced tools for improved control of ventilation networks in underground coal mines; for i) improving the safety at working areas through a better control of methane emissions and climatic conditions, and ii) optimizing the ventilation air flow reducing energy and maintenance costs. Work carried out covered all aspects of the problem, including the development of new concepts in monitoring and control systems and advanced methods for the dynamic regulation of air flow as a function of actual needs. It also included the development of fast sealing systems for use in emergency situations, modelling activities, hardware and software development; and an important experimental work in underground mines and testing facilities. As result of project's work, several novel sensing devices for measuring ventilation and gas parameters were developed: for methane drainage, intelligent detection of hazardous events with discrimination from normal events generating indicator pollutants, advanced fan monitoring, etc. These were complemented with the development of algorithms for performing methane balance, both at longwalls and mine-wide, for managing sensors, for performing automatically some ventilation related tasks, including clearing gas-fast headings and mine-wide ventilation dynamic regulation (Ventilation on Demand). These algorithms were later implemented in software. Finally, Decision Support Systems (DSS) for assisting operators in decisiontaking in non-standard or catastrophic gas or ventilation-related situations were developed. As said above, these developments included an experimental, full scale in most cases, experimental validation, which confirmed the satisfactory operation of devices and software.