Performance assessment of water mist applied in gas burning suppression in underground coal mine

The main objective of the present study was introduced water mist suppressiontechnology to prevent and control gas burning which occurred during drilling at Wu20160working-face in No.10 coal mine of Pingdingshan Ltd..Based on the self-developed ex-periment platform,a series of fire suppression tests to evaluate the performance of a watermist system were conducted.The detailed measurements of the spray characteristics,i.e.,the Sauter Mean Diameter(SMD),the velocity and spray angle which are the main pa-rameters considered in the Study,were obtained by using LS-2000 Sizer.The amount ofwater consumed and the water flux density distribution over the cross section downstreamthe nozzle exit were measured by cup collector method.The operating pressure of thewater mist nozzle is set to 0.5 MPa,the droplet SMD of 104 pm,the water flux density dis-tribution from 0.71 to 8.47 L/(m2.min),the average velocity of 2.14 m/s.The experimentalresults show that the averaged time required for extinguishment is 3.14 s,and the corre-sponding amount of water used during fire test is about 0.11 kg.The gas fire suppressionsystem reduces the temperature in combustion chamber of the experimental apparatusbelow the ignition point of the gas,which can effectively avoid the occurrence of the gasfire in coal mine.