JOURNAL OF ROCK MECHANICS

JOURNAL OF ROCK MECHANICS

Investigating the performance of shearer in long wall method using particle flow code. Case study: Tabas Parvaeh Mechanized Coal Mine

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 Faculty of Mining Engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran.
2 Department of Mining Engineering, Hamadan University of Technology, Hamdan, Iran.
Abstract
Oil, gas, new energy resources, etc. have been reduced, but it is still of great importance in the steel and energy industries. Coal is extracted by surface or underground methods. One of the methods of underground coal extraction is the long-front method. In this method, which is a mechanized method, devices such as graters or shearers are used for extraction. The Tabas Parodeh Mechanized Coal Mine is one of the mines that is extracted by the long-front method. The coal cutting device in this mine is a shearer. In this research, the performance of the shearer device has been investigated using the characteristics of the Tabas Parvadeh Mechanized Mine. To achieve this goal, the modeling method with particle flow code software was used. In this regard, the model was first calibrated by sampling the Parvadeh mine coal and conducting uniaxial and Brazilian tests on that model. Then, by building a model and using variables such as shearer diameter, displacement per revolution, and shearer linear speed, modeling was performed. After building 27 models for the shearer, the best shearer model was selected based on the maximum force applied to the device in the X and Y directions. Finally, the results of this study showed that the best shearer performance is a model with a diameter of 20 mm and a displacement of 0.5 mm per revolution. The maximum force applied to the shearer in this model is 18,800 kilonewtons in the X direction and 16,000 kilonewtons in the Y direction.
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