Sean McGinn – Controlling Diesel Emissions in Underground Mining within an Evolving Regulatory Structure in Canada and the United States of America
This paper presents a historic view of the changing regulations and deployed diesel equipment across North America. Tracking from 1995 Threshold Limit Values (TLV) have been set, and progressively lowered, to limit the health impacts on underground miners.
The lowering limits has encouraged miners and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to work towards engines capable of achieving lower concentrations of both diesel exhaust and respirable combustible dust (RCD) in the atmosphere near working engines.
The author explores the use of different technologies and their measured effectiveness with Diesel Oxidation Catalysts (DOC) and Diesel Particulate Filters (DPF) showing the most effectiveness at reducing Diesel Particulate Materials (DPM). DOC engines are constrained by requiring high exhaust temperatures (>350oC) to remove all DPM elements and this is leading miners to wider deployment of DPF controls.
To achieve required reductions in DPM the author highlights the observed requirement (by the DEEP tri-partite group) for managing engine duty cycles and maintenance of the engine all DPM control elements.
Nineteen (19) references are relied upon to inform the paper.
Last Updated: 16/12/2020 08:53:18am