Research Article Open Access

Understanding the Behavior of Fan Characteristic Curves in Multiple Fans Mines

Abstract

In a single fan mine, the system characteristic curve represents a relation between airflow and pressure drop across the mine. This relation can be easily drawn in a single fan system by assuming different airflow values and calculating the corresponding pressure drop rendering to Atkinson’s law. In multiple-fan mines, the situation is entirely different, and this cannot be done easily for each fan simultaneously. Moreover, each fan has a partial effect on the ventilation system in the mine. Therefore, it will not work with a specific characteristic curve but has a partial performance curve, subsystem characteristic curve, affected by the known fixed resistances in the mine, and the variable resistances represented by the presence of other fans in the mine. However, each fan subsystem characteristic curve can be achieved by applying an alternative mathematical method for plotting subsystem characteristic curves on subsystem quantity-quantity coordinates or equivalently on the quantity-pressure coordinate. Hardy Cross procedure has been incorporated with a switching-parameters technique to trace subsystem characteristic curves. An example using four fans in a complex network is presented here. This example illustrates the nature of the problem and the difficulty of detecting unstable conditions in this type of network.

Ehab Gomaa, EAA Arafatab, El-Nagy K Aab

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