Assessment of gas and dust explosion in coal mines by means of fuzzy fault tree analysis

During the past decade, coal dust and gas explosions have been the most two serious types of disasters in China, threatening the lives of miners and causing significant losses in terms of national property. In this paper, an evaluation model of coal dust and gas explosions was constructed based on a fuzzy fault tree by taking the Xingli Coal Mine as a research site to identify the risk factors of coal dust and gas explosions.Furthermore, the hazards associated with such explosions were evaluated for this particular coal mine.After completing an on-site investigation, the fuzzy probabilities of basic events were obtained through expert scoring, and these expert opinions were then aggregated as trapezoidal fuzzy numbers to calculate the degrees of importance of all basic events. Finally, these degrees of importance were sorted. According to the resulting order, the basic events with higher probabilities were determined to identify key hazards in the daily safety management of this particular coal mine. Moreover, effective measures for preventing gas and coal dust explosions were derived. The fuzzy fault tree analysis method is of high significance in the analysis of accidental coal mine explosions and provides theoretical guidance for improving the efficiency of coal mine safety management in a scientific and feasible manner.