摘要
Traditional coal mining and utilisation patterns are severely detrimental to natural resources and environments and significantly impede safe, low-carbon, clean, and sustainable utilisation of coal resources. Based on the idea of in situ fluidized coal mining that aims to transform solid coal into liquid or gas and transports the fluidized resources to the ground to ensure safe mining and low-carbon and clean utilisation, in this study, we report on a novel in situ unmanned automatic mining method. This includes a flexible, earthworm-like unmanned automatic mining machine (UAMM) and a coal mine layout for in situ fluidized coal mining suitable for the UAMM. The technological and economic advantages and the carbon emission reduction of the UAMM-based in situ fluidized mining in contrast to traditional mining technologies are evaluated as well. The development trends and possible challenges to this design are also discussed. It is estimated that the proposed method costs approximately 49% of traditional coal mining costs. The UAMM-based in situ fluidized mining and transformation method will reduce CO2 emissions by at least 94.9% compared to traditional coal mining and utilisation methods. The proposed approach is expected to achieve safe and environmentally friendly coal mining as well as lowcarbon and clean utilisation of coal.
基金
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the State Key Research Development Program of China (Grant Number 2016YFC0600705)
the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers 51674251, 51727807, and 51374213)
the National Major Project for Science and Technology (Grant Number 2017ZX05049003-006)
and the Innovation Teams of Ten-thousand Talents Program sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (Grant Number 2016RA4067).
