The term of "ventilation network analysis" meant the calculation of airflow distribution in a ventilation network, that is the calculation of airflow rate through each roadway in a mine formerly. However, nowadays the meaning has expanded to mine fire simulation, thermal environment analysis in a mine, detection of abnormal roadways, optimization of network, etc. This paper describes these analyses first.
The heading face is one of the most important places to be ventilated in a mine. There are still some problems remained to be analyzed about the ventilation of heading faces, especially, for the discharge of flammable gases and control of respirable dust. The latter part of the paper describes the result of analysis about the heading face ventilation using an actual size model roadway, small-scaled model roadways and computational fluid dynamics.
