Finding Trapped Miners with Wireless Sensor Networks
Idrees Zaman, Anna Förster, Asad Mahmood, Frederick Thomas Cawood · 2018
Risk management is one of the most important facets in the mining industry. Miners working in the underground production areas are exposed to many risks, i.e. extreme environment, toxic gases and rock bursts. Traditional means of communication usually break down in case of a disaster in the mine. Hence, it becomes impossible to find the miners trapped miles under the ground. This work explores the potential of wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the area of the mining industry and in specific, helping the rescuers to find trapped miners in a disaster scenario. A prototype sensor node operating at 433MHz is designed for monitoring the health of the miners and localising them. Disaster scenarios are emulated in a mock mine to evaluate the performance of the developed sensor node against commodity hardware. Initial results show that WSNs operating at 433MHz combat the disaster scenario much better than the traditional WSNs operating at 2.4GHz.