Abstract
Forcing auxiliry ventilation with an auxiliary fan and a duct is widely employed at heading faces in mines in order to maintain the required safety levels of, particularly combustible gases such as methane, and dust concentration, temperature and humidity. However, it is not necessarily easy to design the optimum ventilation method in given situations, mainly because of the complexity of airflow created in the working place. In other words, there remain many problems that must be solved while many related studies have been reported. One of the major problems is the distribution of gas concentration at a heading place. From this point of view, the authors carried out in-situ measurement of methane gas distribution by a high-resolution gas measuring apparatus and the numerical analysis of the distribution by means of CFD. The results of the measurement present more detailed patterns of gas distribution in the working place and it is also shown that the simulation method employed in this project can be utilized for prediction of the airflow and the gas distribution at the heading in a practically satisfactory accuracy.
