Mine safety system using wireless sensor networks

The activity of mining always had an element of risk associated with it. Miners often had to encounter challenging underground environment which sometimes result in injuries and fatalities. Some portion of them can be attributed to error caused by human carelessness. More often the cause of these accidents can be attributed to the ambient conditions. In this paper, we design a mine safety system using wireless sensor networks with measurement of parameters such as temperature, air-flow, humidity, noise, dust, and gas concentration. These six ambient characteristics have been identified as hazardous to the health and safety of the mine worker. From the experimental results obtained, an accurate mine safety system is achieved by design of various sensors. The temperature sensors, humidity sensor, airflow sensor, and noise sensor achieved an accuracy of 94.45%, 98.55%, 85.4%, 99.14% alternatively. Besides, the dust sensor has a resolution of 0.003mg/m3 and the gas sensor show a resolution of 0.9ppm which is close to the required resolution of 1 ppm.

I. Introduction

The concept of mining has been around since the beginning of civilization; our ancestors used stones, ceramics and later metals found close to earth's surface to make tools and weapons. The activity of mining always had an element of risk associated with it. Miners often had to encounter challenging underground environment which sometimes result in injuries and fatalities. Some portion of them can be attributed to error caused by human carelessness. More often the cause of these accidents can be attributed to the ambient conditions underground.