With the development of energy industry and the progress of science and technology, China’s coal mining methods have gone through various stages of development, such as manpower mining, blasting mining, general mining and fully mechanized mining. At present, the industry is striding forward on the road to intelligent mining. Coal mining is a complex systems engineering, in order to achieve intelligent mining, a large technology cluster should be achieved. In recent years, our country has made remarkable progress in the intellectualization of mining. In some working faces with simple geological conditions, an intelligent mining mode based on the combination of remote video monitoring and manual intervention and characterized by memory cutting has been preliminarily formed. However, due to the limitation of precision detection technology, the intelligent mining is still difficulty in the complex geological conditions. The technology presented by CCTEG Xi ’an Research Institute in 19th International Coal and Mining Expo is expected to solve this problem and advance intelligent coal mining.
In order to meet the demand of intelligent coal mining, CCTEG Xi’an Research Institute has gone through technology-oriented research, development, testing and demonstration, successfully developed seismic exploration while mining technology and seismic exploration while road heading technology. Different from the previous seismic exploration technology, the new innovated technologies takes the vibration signal produced by the road-header or shearer when cutting the coal as the seismic source signal. The disadvantage of limited application of explosive seismic source is overcome. By deploying seismic sensors in the roadway or two entries and boreholes to receive real-time signals, the normal production activities of the coal mine are no longer to be affected. Using real-time processing of seismic exploration data and dynamic imaging technology, realizing the precise detection of static geological conditions such as faults, subsided columns and thinning areas of coal seams in a certain area in front of or in the working face, as well as the monitoring and early warning of dynamic disaster conditions such as roof broken zone, stress concentration zone and outburst dangerous zone, coal mine was equipped with a pair of “Clairvoyance”!
The two technologies are long-term real-time dynamic monitoring technology. The biggest difference with the traditional mine seismic exploration is that the static structure development and the dynamic stress change in the mining face can be dynamically monitored. According to the monitoring results, three-dimensional geological model of the mining face is optimized and dynamically refreshed in real time. The transparency of the working face is gradually and progressively realized. Then a three-dimensional geological dynamic model within a certain range in front of the mining work is constructed to realize intelligent coal mining. Coal cutting operation may transfer from "memory cut" to "predicted cut".
In a demonstration project of a mine in Wuhai, Inner Mongolia, the maximum detection distance is 300 meters, more than 60 times than the thickness of coal seam, and the error of fault detection distance is less than 5 meters. In the demonstration application of Tangjiahui Coal Mine in Inner Mongolia, a small fault of 0.5 m has been successfully predicted 200 m advance. The prediction position error is only 8 m. In a demonstration project of a mine in Guizhou Province, the advanced detection distance is more than 200 meters and two small faults with fault distance less than half coal thickness are detected. In the application of Tangjiahui Coal Mine in Inner Mongolia, two structural anomalies are predicted 350 meters in advance.
