If a mine fire takes place somewhere underground and unfortunately does the mine fail to suppress in its early stage, there is a great possibility to cause heavy casualities.
In many coal producing countries, therefore, they put great efforts into development work on new fire detection and control methods.
Herein, the author presents situation and results so far in research field on mine fire characteristics such as propagation speed, temperature distribution, gas composition, explosibility of aftergas mixture, smoke emission and ventilation disturbance, and also describes current state and trend of underground mine fire detection and suppression technologies.