A tightly coupled GIS and spatiotemporal modeling for methane emission simulation in the underground coal mine system

Abstract

Mine safety is of primary concern in the underground coal mining system. At present, there is a lack of an efficient platform to manage the numerical simulation procedure and inherent spatiotemporal data for coal mine disasters. This necessitates the coupling of spatiotemporal model with geographic information system (GIS) in practical application. Here, a novel spatiotemporal model tightly coupled with GIS is presented to improve the model-data integration. Such tight coupling is achieved by developing a lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) based turbulent model with an underlying shared FluentEntity model within the LongRuanGIS platform. The case study and comparison with the traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method demonstrated that the platform is capable and effective in providing functionalities for lattice domain decomposition, simulation, visualization and analyses, as well as improving the computational efficiency. The proposed approach and platform, promising for the disaster prevention, offer a template for future GIS-Model integration and also applicable for other underground coal mine disasters.