Optimization of environmental maintenance system used in a refuge chamber

Abstract

Mine refuge chambers are used to shield miners who fail to escape from the mine when incidents occur. Environment maintaining system plays a key role in stabilizing thermal environment of a mine refuge chamber against heat emitted from metabolism and transferred from outside. The safety and comfort of refugees are closely related to the environment maintaining system design. In order to improve the comfort of refugees, optimization on the environment maintaining system has been done based on the previous work. To evaluate the environment of the chamber, eight volunteers were involved into the experiment. Under close observation and safety protection, they lived in a heat-isolated test chamber for 106 hours. The volunteers were asked to maintain low level of activities to simulate refugees' situation. It shows that the environment maintaining system worked well and the temperature, relative humidity and emitted harmful air content such as CO 2 and CO were all kept in the safety level, and no discomfort was felt by volunteers at all.