Wireless ventilation control for large-scale systems : The mining industrial case

• Mining ventilation is an interesting example of a large scale system with high environmental impact where advanced control strategies can bring major improvements. Indeed, one of the first objectives of modern mining industry is to fulfill environmental specifications [1] during the ore extraction and crushing, by optimizing the energy consumption or the production of polluting agents. The mine electric consumption was 4 % of total industrial electric demand in the US in 1994 (6 % in 2007 in South Africa) and 90 % of it was related to motor system energy [2]. Another interesting figure is given in [3] where it is estimated that the savings associated with global control strategies for fluid systems (pumps, fans and compressors) represent approximately 20 % of the total manufacturing motor system energy savings. This motivates the development of new control strategies for large scale aerodynamic processes based on appropriate automation and a global consideration of the system. More specifically, the challenge in this work is focused on the mining ventilation since as much as 50 % or more of the energy consumed by the mining process may go into the ventilation (including heating the air). It is clear that investigating automatic control solutions and minimizing the amount of pumped air to save energy consumption (proportional to the cube of airflow quantity [4]) is of great environmental and industrial interest.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Signalbehandling (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Signal Processing (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Advanced control strategy

Automatic control

Control strategies

Electric consumption

Electric demand

Energy consumption

Environmental specifications

Fluid systems

Global control strategies

Large-scale aerodynamics

Mining industry

Mining process

Motor systems

Ore extraction

Polluting agents

Save energy

South Africa

Ventilation control

Automation

Communication

Control

Energy conservation

Environmental impact

Extraction

Large scale systems

Mining

Motors

Ore treatment

Partial discharges

Sensor networks

Sensors

Strategic planning

Systems engineering

Technical presentations

Ventilation

Ad hoc networks

Signal processing

Signalbehandling

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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