Guojun Wang

The mining of layered soft bauxite under coal seams (BCS) will cause serious underground goaf disasters and surface Bayer process red mud (BRM) pollution. In order to realize the safe and efficient mining of BCS, the feasibility of recycling BRM as a backfilling aggregate was explored. A series of tests were conducted to prevent the pollution diversion of BRM from surface storage to underground goafs, and a numerical simulation analysis of the backfilling mining process was carried out based on FLAC^3D to protect the overlying coal seam. The results show that: under the action of encapsulation, solidification and inhibiting precipitation from cementitious materials, the leaching concentration of harmful substances in red mud-based cemented backfill (RCB) can be reduced 70% more than fresh BRM. Mining disturbance redistributes the in-situ stress field of overlying strata; normal backfilling can not only reduce the pressure stress of pillars, but also release the tensile stress in the roof and floor from +0.4956 MPa to −0.1992 MPa, effectively preventing roof subsidence. Since the creep damage process of past backfill will absorb and dissipate lots of energy, the disturbance range caused by backfill mining is controlled within 3 m, which is only 10% of the open-stope method.

With the continuous development of Artificial Intelligence technology and Internet of Things engineering, more and more driver-less vehicles have been developed and put into industrial production. The birth of driver-less vehicles undoubtedly brings new vitality to a large amount of industries, particularly in transportation. For the mining industry, transportation is undoubtedly an extremely important link in the whole production process. If the driver-less vehicles can be applied to the underground mines, it can not only improve the production and transportation capacity of the whole mine but also can reduce the occurrence of many mine safety accidents. ZigBee WSN technology can play a greater role in the narrow environment such as underground mines according to the relevant literature; this concept paper, similar to an engineering project plan, mainly tries to integrate the ZigBee WSN technology and the communication-based train control (CBTC) system to explore the possibility of the driver-less vehicles to be used in the underground mines, which aims to solve practical engineering problems for the engineering projects. As the mining engineers, we put forward the concept of this integrated system in this concept paper, but we need to continue to work hard for the future of the underground mines. This concept paper serves as a guide to Tossing out a brick to get a jade gem, and it has a few implications for the development of underground mine transportation.