Estimate of vegetation efficiency on reducing dust concentration produced by a surface coal mine

Abstract

A new vegetative barrier can help to reduce dust concentration in a surface coal mine neighbourhood. The project reports about quantification of this effect. An air flow field is computed together with the dust transport driven by it using an in-house CFD solver. The 2D cuts of a real geometry of Bílina coal mine in north Bohemia are used. The vegetation is modelled as horizontally homogeneous porous medium which slows the air flow inside. An influence on turbulence and filtering the dust particles by the deposition on the leaves is considered inside the barrier too. For the efficiency estimation of the barrier several integral and point criteria are used.