Designing and Implementing the Tube Bundle Hut at Wambo Coal
Posted: 06/12/2012 12:00:00 AM EDT | 0
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Mining IQ recently spoke with Alex Mackay, Ventilation Officer at Peabody Energy's Wambo Coal site, about the design and installation of their own Tube Bundle Hut. Alex discusses the process involved in designing a new product and how he ensured the product would be AS3000 compliant.
Alex is will also be presenting a session on this in more detail, at the upcoming Mine Ventilation 2012 conference, taking place in Brisbane on 3-4 July.
Why did you choose to create your own Tube Bundle Hut on the Wambo Coal site when there are existing suppliers in the market?
Other systems had installed additional engineering controls to achieve compliance with AS3000, leading to increased cost and complexity of the huts, and essentially adding in more things that can break down and cause the hut to fail. Our approach was to follow the idea of analyser huts from the oil and gas industry and have the hazardous equipment installed in an open enclosure, eliminating the potential for any gas build-up, which is the main issue with AS3000 compliance, and thereby keeping the design simpler and cheaper.
A local electrical engineering firm with a good relationship with the mine was approached and over the course of several meetings a plan was formulated to develop a tube bundle hut to meet the needs of the mine.
Sourcing suitable equipment proved to be the most time consuming. There were several criteria that had to be met for both site electrical standards and environmental considerations, and often the most common equipment would only meet two out of three requirements, so it was a time consuming process to track down manufacturers and equipment that met our requirements.
Sometimes in order to introduce new concepts and ideas it is often up to the mine personnel to drive the process, whether it be a tube bundle hut, real time gas monitoring or ventilation strategy. If you are willing to put in the time and effort to develop a new concept you will be rewarded.
No issues, which is just what we wanted – a boring, reliable operation. However, the next step is to install a Process Gas Chromatograph by the end of the year to allow continuous monitoring for ethane, hydrogen and ethylene, in addition to the current oxygen, methane, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
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