Research on Cooling and Hazardous Gas Dilution Performance of Underground Mining Culvert Ventilation System

The ventilation system of a mine determines the comfort and safety of the underground working environment. Although many studies have been devoted to reducing the impact of underground heat damage, there are still few comprehensive studies or optimizations aimed at simultaneously considering heat damage prevention and control, exhaust of mechanical equipment, and methane leakage. To address this knowledge gap, a mine ventilation model was built and validated to analyze the impact of different numbers of top fans on the distribution characteristics of temperature and gas mass fraction. Subsequently, the impact of different blowing duct inlet temperatures and velocities on the capacity to cool and dilute hazardous gases was investigated. Finally, a comprehensive coefficient that removes the effect of dimension was proposed for evaluating the cooling and dilution performance of different top fan cases. The results show that a top fan is the most advantageous for cooling the mine, but has a poor ability to dilute hazardous gases. Three top fans have the best performance for diluting hazardous gases, which leads to some degree of heat diffusion, but obtains the maximum total comprehensive coefficient of 0.71246.