Improvement in Ventilation with Minimum Risk of Spontaneous Heating in Mines of Jharia Coalfield

Acute ventilation problem at workings is the main constraint for achieving targeted production in many mines of Jharia Coalfield. It is difficult to resolve this problem without installing high pressure fan, but it may lead to spontaneous heating. To overcome this problem, ventilation schemes for a few such mines have been worked out incorporating dynamic balancing of pressure technique which effectively neutralizes the adverse effects of high ventilation pressure and thus the problem of air leakage into sealed off area. In this paper, brief description of a mine, the problem, results of investigation and computer simulation studies, methodology adopted for implementation of dynamic balancing of pressure and results after implementation of pressure balancing in the mine have been discussed in detail.