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Indexed by:会议论文

Date of Publication:2009-01-01

Included Journals:CPCI-S

Page Number:1069-1076

Key Words:Extreme environment; Underground coal mine; Thermal zone diagram; Mean skin temperature

Abstract:Underground coal mines are special type of environments which should call significant attention since they directly relate to miners' productivity and well-being. With the coal exploitation into deep underground, coal mine environments encounter high temperature and humidity risks because of large amount of heat generation from geothermal heat, mining machines, coal oxidation, etc. Under such extreme circumstances, it is very critical to understand the thermal status of human bodies and establish corresponding criteria to evaluate if underground environments are suitable for miners' daily work.
   There have been many assessment methods for coal mine environment. However, none of current existent methods can comprehensively evaluate the underground coal mine environment since most methods consider only one or finite factors and neglect others which may lead to bias. In order to evaluate the human body's thermal status from both personal and environmental points, this investigation has adopted both mean skin temperature and dry-bulb temperature to establish a zone diagram. The calculation of mean skin temperature is based on the heat balance of human body with the ambient. Then existent regulations on coal mine environments and some typical condition parameters in underground coal mines are applied to circumscribe different thermal zones.
   The established thermal zone diagram contains the preferable condition zone, acceptable condition zone, and prohibited zone. If the dry-bulb temperature of an underground coal mine and the mean skin temperature of miners fall in both the preferable or acceptable zones, heat stress symptoms should not emerge in much chance. However, in any circumstance the combination of dry-bulb and mean skin temperature should avoid in the prohibited zone. The developed zone diagram method takes parameters from both human body and the surrounding environment and hence it is more comprehensive.