Evaluation of Measured Digital Output of Gas Sensors During Spontaneous Heating of Coal

ABSTRACT

Spontaneous heating is the major cause of unintentional coal burning in the underground coal mine. It is responsible for releasing a number of combustible gases. For measuring the concentration of these gases, the role of gas sensors becomes very important to plan efficient preventive measures. In general, the outputs of sensor produced in digital format after processing through the microcontroller platform. However, the sensor data need to be displayed in a standard format. Therefore, a tool is needed to convert the digital output of the sensors to the standard format (PPM or %) in actual environmental condition. Hence, in the present paper, mathematical expressions have been deduced for each sensor to produce the output in a standard format for test environmental condition and the same were compared simultaneously with the handheld gas analyzer. The results were found in agreement.

KEYWORDS:

• Spontaneous heating
• Gases
• Sensors
• Underground coal mine

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Director, CSIR-Central Institute of Mining and Fuel Research, Dhanbad, India for permitting the authors to publish the paper. The research work has been carried out for Network Project ESC0112. The views expressed in this article are that of the authors and not necessarily of the organization they belong to.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Subhash Kumar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9719-1856 P. K. Mishra http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8714-7299

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Council of Scientific and Industrial Research [grant number ESC0112].

Notes on contributors

Subhash Kumar

Subhash Kumar is a PhD Scholar at Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad, India and was a Senior Research Fellow at CSIR-Central Institute of Mining & Fuel Research, Dhanbad, India. E-mail: [email protected]

P. K. Mishra

P K Mishra is Principal Scientist at CSIR-Central Institute of Mining & Fuel Research, Dhanbad, India.

Jitendra Kumar

Jitendra Kumar is Associate Professor at Indian Institute of Technology (ISM), Dhanbad, India. E-mail: [email protected]