Determination of the Appropriate Speed for Drum Shearers Considering Coal Strength and Gas Content in Tabas Mechanized Mine

To increase and Join production in coal mining panels, predicting and determining the appropriate speed of these devices can greatly help the project implementation time and economics of designs. For this purpose, 1260 types of coal, cut by the coal mining machine were carried out in the E3 extraction panel of the Tabas mechanized mine. First, after recording the shearer speed of each cut, the information about gas flow was collected at three points along the total length of the panel. These three points include emitted methane gases as a percentage on sensor 88, the tailgate input sensor (TG), and the sensor embedded on the Armored face conveyor (AFC). Shearer speed was predicted with three models of linear and nonlinear multivariate regression (exponential and logarithmic). The results show that the multivariate linear regression model with a coefficient of determination R2=0.90 has a more accurate prediction than the other two methods using the linear multivariate regression model, the amount of shearer speed can be predicted with good accuracy. For this purpose, the genetic algorithm in MATLAB software has been used to optimize the speed of the shearer device. Determining the appropriate speed results show that cross diagrams based ‌on coefficient of determination (R2), according to Equations (logarithmic, exponential ‌and linear), linear ‌type ‌has a ‌higher coefficient of determination than other equations. Therefore, the best model is selected to determine the appropriate speed. Using the linear equation in the genetic algorithm, the extraction speed of the shearer machine was estimated to be 4.79 m/min.