This study focused on developing a risk assessment method for explosion at a coal reclaim tunnel (CRT) facility. The method was developed based on an analytical hierarchy process (AHP), which is an expert system that quantifies the factors of explosion incidents, based on events and hierarchies. In this paper, the proposed model was modification from original AHP model, specifically modifying the structure from ''alternative's results'' to ''total risk-rating's results''. The total risk-rating is obtained by summing up risk-rating of each factor, where the risk-rating is a multiplication product of the risk value by the AHP weighted value. To support decision-making using the expert system, data on the real conditions of the CRT were collected and analyzed. A physical modeling of the CRT with laboratory-scale experiments was carried out to show the impact of a ventilation system in CRT on diluting the methane gas and coal dust, in order to support the quantification of AHP risk value. The criteria to evaluate the risk of explosion was constructed from six components that are: fuel, oxygen, ignition, confinement, dispersion, and monitoring system. Those components had fifty-two factors that serve as sub-components (root causes). The main causes of explosion in CRT were found to be: mechanical ventilation failure and abnormal ventilation, breakdown of monitoring system, and coal spontaneous-combustion. Assessments of two CRT facilities at Mine A and Mine B were carried out as a case study in order to check the reliability of the developed AHP method. The results showed that the risk rating of Mine A was classified as high and Mine B was classified as medium, which is in a good agreement with the site conditions.
Tracer gas measurements have been carried out at the Pongkor underground gold mine, Indonesia, to evaluate mine ventilation flows and to investigate the effective turbulent diffusion coefficients in mine airways. The airflow routes and quantity, and the diffusion coefficient have been obtained by matching the measurements with numerical simulations using the advection-diffusion equation. Two leakages with flow quantity of 26.7 and 36.7 m 3 /s were detected. Reduction of leakages have been measured with the method after stopping the leakage routes. The turbulent diffusion coefficients for the simple airways have good agreement with the Taylor equation. However, for complex airways in operating mines, the coefficients show higher values (1.5 to 32 times) than that obtained by the Taylor equation and these have been compared with the data measured in the Kushiro coal mine, Japan. It is mainly affected by the ratio of airway length over equivalent diameter and airway frictions, but airflow mixing along the airway also has an effect on the diffusion coefficient.
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