Underground Mine Cooling & Ventilation Systems
Effective mine cooling and ventilation for the below ground operations
As mining enterprises dig dipper in more remote locations, it's more important than ever that below ground operations are effectively cooled and ventilated. With surface temperatures regularly topping 45 degrees, not achieving this leaves your staff vulnerable to serious health risks and your equipment prone to malfunction.
What is required for effective underground mine cooling and ventilation?
There’s no federal legislation in Australia when it comes to occupational health and safety and mine cooling. Instead, each state has its own requirements for what must be done to safeguard employees.
Generally, this refers to eliminating the risks of heat related injuries such as heatstroke and heat exhaustion, and the use of underground mine ventilation to remove toxic gases which can build up due to mining activity.
To do this effectively, the following mining ventilation equipment is usually required:
1. Cooling towers for mines
Evaporative cooling towers work by dissipating excess heat via water evaporation. Among the roles our rental towers can fulfill are:
- Supplementing cooling water flows.
- Providing additional cooling for planned system upgrades.
- Helping mines recover from in-built cooling tower failures in emergency situations.
Our cooling towers can be combined to provide multi-megawatts of water and bulk air cooling to your mine. Our solutions have been designed to minimise electricity consumption while still reducing drift rate to significantly less than what’s required by law.
3. Air conditioners for mines
Heat and humidity are among the most serious health risks facing mining staff and can also cause damage to your operations equipment. As such, standalone air conditioning units are essential for safety and productivity.
With cooling capacities ranging from 5 to 200 kW, our portable air conditioners are perfectly suited for maintaining safe temperatures in a wide range of different settings.
As well as reducing air temperatures, they remove moisture, making underground working environments far more comfortable for staff on long shifts. All of our mine air conditioners can be provided with a complete range of ancillary equipment.
2. Chillers for mines
When you have high volume mines in hot countries like Australia, it’s common that you’ll need additional or emergency cooling plants on top of your air conditioning units.
Here you have a choice between water-cooled and air-cooled chillers. While water-cooled options are usually more energy efficient and take up less space, air-cooled are generally quicker to mobilise.
Our experts can help you select which would be better suited to your operation in terms of type and size.
4. Heat exchangers for mines
Instead of cooling or heating a process or fluid through direct contact, sometimes the best method is to use a heat exchanger. A heat exchanger keeps fluids separate while allowing constant energy transfer to take place.
Our skid-mounted rentals are perfect for removing bottlenecks and deploying when built-in alternatives fail. In addition, heat exchangers can be combined with chillers to cool a wide range of process fluids.