Purushotham Tukkaraja

By Purushotham Tukkaraja, Rahul Bhargava and Srivatsan Jayaraman Sridharan

Radon, a radioactive noble gas, is a decay product of uranium found in varying concentrations in all soils and rocks in the earth crust. It is colorless, odorless, tasteless, and a leading cause of lung cancer death in the USA. A study of underground miners shows that 40% of lung cancer deaths may be due to radon progeny exposure. In underground mines, radon monitoring and exposure standards help in limiting miners’ exposure to radioactivity. Radon mitigation techniques play an important role in keeping its concentration levels under permissible limits. This chapter presents a review of the radon sources and monitoring standards followed for underground mines in the USA. Also, the different radon prediction and measurement techniques employed in the underground mines and potential mitigation techniques for underground mining operations are discussed.

Part of the book: Mining Technology

By Purushotham Tukkaraja, Srivatsan Jayaraman Sridharan, Kayode Ajayi, Ankit Jha, Yong Pan, Rahul Bhargava, Gemechu Turi, Doruk Erogul, Anil Baysal and Saiprasad Sreekumar Ajitha

The primary objective of this research is to provide practical mine ventilation engineering tools (i.e., cave resistances and pollutant emission rates) to model and predict adequate airflows and pressure drops across the cave with respect to cave propagation in underground block or panel cave mines. We used several research methods to investigate the phenomenon of cave ventilation and pollutant gas emissions in block or panel cave mines. The research methods include computational fluid dynamics (CFD)—continuum and discrete approaches in conjunction with advanced geo-mechanical analysis through numerical modeling, scale model studies, mathematical modeling, field observations, discrete fracture network (DFN), flow through porous media, particle flow code (PFC), Ventsim, MATLAB, and Python programming. The study investigated the several research questions related to block or panel cave mines: immature and mature cave properties, radon and airflow behavior, radon control measures, cave characteristics, ventilation on demand, blasting fumes, prediction of porosity, and permeability of different cave zones, the effect of undercut ventilation, forcing, exhaust and the push-pull system, the effect of airgap, and broken rock porosity and permeability on the cave ventilation system. The findings from this study provide useful information for optimizing the block or panel cave mine ventilation systems.

Part of the book: Mining Technology