Scholarly record

MODELLING OF THE CUTTING PROCESS OF UNDERGROUND COAL MINING WITH SHEARER LOADERS FOR ADAPTIVE HORIZON CONTROL

Mirjam Holm

Abstract

Horizon control in underground coal mining is still largely based on the knowledge and experience of a human operator, while many other operations run fully automated in mines nowadays. Several control strategies have been developed for automatic horizon control in underground coal mines, but none of them worked satisfactorily for a long distance up to now, even if the used sensors execute their intended task already and were improved continuously. However, the behaviour of the mining system itself, especially the dependence on the surrounding conditions, is not taken into account in most cases, because it is classified as complex and difficult to describe, not least because of the different and specific environmental conditions of each exploitation area. Nevertheless, those surrounding conditions have a high influence on the cutting behaviour of the exploitation machine. Thus, to achieve the aim of a completely autonomous cutting process with a satisfactory performance, the challenge is to detect the behaviour of the system online. This would make it possible to adapt the automatic steering process and the control algorithm based on the predominant environmental conditions. Therefore, in this paper a simulation model for the cutting process is developed with the aim to get a prediction model for the cut behaviour of the exploitation machine, considering the dependence on the surrounding conditions. The model has to be as complex as necessary to reach a sufficient accuracy to describe the mining process and, on the other hand, it has to be as simple as possible to keep the necessary computing effort small enough to run the simulation online, parallel to the mining process. The reliability of the developed model is analysed by comparing the simulation results for different scenarios to reference values of an iteratively working, complex kinematic simulation tool, which was developed in cooperation with a German mining company for the training of operators at the coal face. Using the kinematics-based simulation tool as reference source gives the advantage of generating defined surrounding conditions and enables an objective evaluation of the performance of the developed model.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2019/1.3/s03.054

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