Underground Priorities
The underground research requirements for 2010 cover two sustainability areas – welfare of community and employees, and profitability.
IMPROVED HEALTH AND SAFETY
- Investigation of key underground health and safety issues and management practices, including legislative best practice alternatives.
- Improving the management of principal/major/core underground mining hazards such as gas, fires, spon com, explosions and strata control. Outburst research goals include efficient collection of data, reservoir characterisation, more reliable detection of structures, improved gas drainage, education and training initiatives and improved outburst management protocols.
- Improving equipment operator interfaces and collision avoidance, improved automation and remote control.
- Reduced exposure to vibration impacts, improved ergonomics and appropriate operator skills and practices; (best practice case studies should be highlighted) for both underground and surface personnel.
- Less repetitive heavy manual handling, more use of lightweight materials.
- Better controls for airborne contaminants (eg dust and diesel emissions) and noise exposure.
- Continuously improving the adequacy and effectiveness of emergency response measures.
- Innovative processes to assist in the understanding and management of operator fatigue issues (this applies also to the exploration, coal preparation and open cut areas).
- Improved risk management tools/approaches (this applies also to the exploration, coal preparation and open cut areas).
MANAGEMENT OF MINING CONDITIONS
- Practical methods for defining estimation errors, confidence limits and classification of resources and reserves (applicable to both open cut and underground sectors).
- Improved coal quality estimates during exploration through quantification of impacts of organic fluids and pre-treatment on laboratory results and derivation of credible coal quality data from down-hole geophysics (applicable to open cut, underground and coal preparation sectors).
- Improved efficiency and effectiveness in detecting anomalies and discontinuities, characterising ground conditions using innovative methods of drilling, exploration and geophysical survey.
- • Develop techniques and procedures to improve the effectiveness of ground control systems using monitoring systems, integrated real time models, industry wide analysis and improved designs. Approaches to dealing with deeper and more challenging mining environments are invited.
HIGHER PRODUCTIVITY MINING
- Improvements in roadway development systems and equipment.
- Application of remote control and automation processes to increase productivity and reduce operator exposure to hazards.
- Improved reliability of longwall systems, and further development of non-traditional longwall methods (eg top coal caving, thin seam mining).
- Continuous improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of gas drainage practices is required to support high productivity mining in gassy seams; better techniques to understand and test insitu gas conditions are required.
EQUIPMENT AND MINING SYSTEMS RELIABILITY
- Improvements to the design and uses of equipment to maximise safety, operability purpose, reliability, maintainability and energy efficiency.
- Increase the uptime of mining and services processes, including the application of predictive maintenance methods.
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