Date

2021-8-31

Author

Aytaç, Şahabettin Mert

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Coal has a significant role in energy production, which is an essential factor in sustainable development. Overburden removal and coal production capacities have to be increased to provide sufficient amount and quality of coal continuously to thermal power plants to meet the increasing energy demand. In this study, discrete event simulation was implemented to determine the optimum equipment fleet for overburden removal operation in a surface coal mine. According to the long-term plan prepared by the company that provided data, the annual production rate was targeted to be increased significantly for ten consecutive years between 2021 and 2030. The foreseen amount of increase in overburden material led to the necessity of investigating whether this capacity can be met by utilizing conventional load-haul equipment. The fuel usage of haul trucks was investigated to determine the environmental impact of the production schedule by means of carbon dioxide emissions as well. Through this study, a preliminary model of the dispatch algorithm was developed, and the production of a surface coal mine was simulated for each year with the GPS data collected on-site. HAULSIM® 3D haulage simulation software was used to create the production models. The simulated dispatch model contains the road network, excavation site, dumpsite, and ancillary facilities of a surface coal mine in Turkey. Each production year was simplified to be represented by a shorter duration of operation days. After each model was run, simulation model results indicated that a traffic congestion might occur in some areas due to blockage of the trucks. A new mine plan and road network were designed to solve this issue, and the new models were re-evaluated to determine the required number of trucks to meet the planned production. Environmental impacts of the mining equipment were investigated through this study by comparing fuel consumption data of trucks utilized for previous and current mine plans. As a result of the study, it was proven that the new mine plan and new road network helped to solve the traffic issue by increasing the production rate by 26% for the year 2024, 6% for the year 2025, 33% for the year 2026, 23% for the year 2028 and 3% for the year 2030. It is suggested that a fleet management system is implemented to provide real-time data related to the production and the machine health of mobile equipment. By eliminating traffic congestions, the required number of trucks decreased 27% in traffic congestion areas by the aid of the new mine plan and road design. The collected data could be used to better represent the current operation by simulation and the development of business intelligence tools for continuous improvement.

Subject Keywords

Overburden stripping, Discrete event simulation, Fleet management system, Truck-excavator allocation, Truck dispatch

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/92182

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis