underground coal mining, Tag

Last week I wrote about the development of steel girders, and how they were designed to hold the immediate roof above the tunnel, but not the weight of rock all the way to the surface...

With thoughts of the miners in Chile, and suggestions that a rescue tunnel will also be started to try and drive down through the broken rock, I thought I would write a little today about holding rock together...

In the last couple of years, there has been a growing concern about the amount of coal that remains in the productive reserve for the world. At the same time, the incoming British Government, which had been somewhat antagonistic...

In the last post on this subject, I wrote about how miners were able to remove almost all the coal from a section, either by leaving small remnant pillars or building packs to hold the roof in place, while that coal was removed...

Previous talks in this series can be found by clicking on tech talk, in the tags, or at the top of the "Home" screen.

One of the problems that has consistently plagued underground coal mining lies in the height of the coal seam that is being mined. This was the portal (i.e. entrance) to a coal mine that we once ran a research project in,...