Interactive methane monitoring system modeling and simulation for coal mines

The methane monitoring system for coal mines is capable of detecting apparent changes in the value of the mine gas composition. It could provide guidance for coal miners to escape following the safest and fastest route while a mine disaster was occurring. In this paper, the coal mine network topology model was established. Furthermore, it is desirable to apply XML-based mechanism for data storage in order to enhance the interoperability. In following, Gaussian puff model was built for the sake of simulating the process of methane gas diffusion with model parameters adjusted according to the coal mine network topology. Application of this model was of great significance for realizing the Markov-chain based simulation engine. The escape routes for coal miners were generated and optimized using the Dijkstra algorithm. The experiment results suggest that the methane gas concentration proved to be the major precursor indicating the gas emission hazard. In addition, the correctness and validity of the proposed model was verified though modeling and simulation of the Daping coal mine in China.