Optimization of underground mine water supply network

Abstract

A qualified and effective mine water supply system is of great significance for mine dust prevention, mine cooling, fire fighting and other related mining activities that contributing to mine safety. The study in this paper was to improve the efficiency of an underground mine water supply network while taking the water demands, hydraulic conditions, resilience capability and economic cost into consideration. By means of model predictive control technology, an optimal control sequence was computed to minimize a multi-objective cost function that was subject to both physical and operation constrains in the actual network. Comparison of the performance between the original and optimized network was undertaken at a hydraulic condition with typically severe breakdown. Results showed the optimized mine water supply network achieved 95.5% increase for resilience performance with only 17.6% additional investment budget.