The production level drifts represent a critical part of Mechanized Block Caving operations, because the production strongly depends on a continuous mining activity. A frequent cause of delay, limiting the use of diesel powered load-haul-dump (LHD) production equipment is the high pollution levels in the drifts produced by ore transportation. In theory, a well designed mine ventilation system should be able to provide sufficient air to ventilate the drifts, but operational conditions, non-aerodynamic design and construction problems can result in inefficient ventilation systems. The shock losses produced by air entering the level drifts from the intake raise, and of the air leaving the drift by an exhaust raise, can be critical. In this study, these losses have been calculated through a finite volume method, using a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code and a k-epsilon turbulent model.
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