Richard Wisniewski, Quanterion Senior Engineer, has had a paper published in the Transactions of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration. The paper is based on work performed by Quanterion for the Virginia Center for Coal and Energy Research at Virginia Tech as part of National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) 2010-N-12081. The work included the development of a uniform methodology for evaluating the reliability and availability of coal mine tracking systems.
Underground coal mine tracking and communication system reliability and availability methodology
Transactions of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration, 2014, Vol. 336, No. 1, pp. 426-434
Wisniewski, R.; Schafrik, S.
ABSTRACT:
Every underground coal mine in the United States must deploy and operate a wireless communication and electronic tracking system. This paper addresses the reliability and availability of an installed tracking system and the communications infrastructure that supports it. This paper assumes that the tracking system uses the communication system to perform its operation. A particular interest is the requirements for the systems to operate continuously without failure after a mine disaster for 24 hours, and the requirements in the MINER Act for the tracking systems to be “functional, reliable and calculated to be serviceable” and the communications systems “redundancy.” These requirements imply a certain reliability and availability. This paper describes a quantitative way to assess these systems requirements, using tools that are available to and commonly used by the reliability, maintainability and availability community.
The paper is available here: http://www.smenet.org/Transactions
Note: To read the paper you must be a member of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration (SME).