Surface mining activities, exploitation of ore, and stripping and dumping of the overburden cause changes in the land cover and land use of a mine area. The area of land disturbance can be very large in the case of surface coal mining, due to the nature of the coal extraction process. Sustainable mining requires continuous monitoring of changes in land cover and land use induced by the mining activities. This is essentially important for identifying the long-term impacts of mining on theenvironment and on land cover in order to provide necessary mine closure andreclamation measures. In this sense, digital image classification provides apowerful tool for obtaining rigorous data, and reduces the cost of field measurements in time and money, particularly when dealing with large areas. Various remote sense data records and image classification techniques serve different features for numerous purposes. The selection of a suitable data and image classification method is significant for ensuring the effective use of information extracted from the satellite images, e.g. land-use classes. This paper proposes a methodology for identifying land-use change in surface coal mines using multi-temporal high-resolution satellite images. The methodology has been implemented for identifying, quantifying and analysing the spatial response of landscape to surface mining activities in the Goynuk, Bolu surface mine in Turkey, from 2004 to 2008. The methodology essentially entails (i) acquiring data, (ii) preprocessing the data, (iii)image classification using the maximum likelihood classification algorithm (iv) accuracy assessment and (v) change detection analysis depending on class-based approaches. The results show that the methodology can be utilised effectively in monitoring land-use change in surface coal mining areas. It also provides essential input for planning mine reclamation and closure activities.

Reliability-based maintenance policies allow qualitative and quantitative evaluation of system downtimes via revealing main causes of breakdowns and discussing required preventive activities against failures. Application of preventive maintenance is especially important for mining machineries since production is highly affected from machinery breakdowns. Overburden stripping operations are one of the integral parts in surface coal mine productions. Draglines are extensively utilized in overburden stripping operations and they achieve earthmoving activities with bucket capacities up to 168 m³. The massive structure and operational severity of these machines increase the importance of performance awareness for individual working components. Research on draglines is rarely observed in the literature and maintenance studies for these earthmovers have been generally ignored. On this basis, this paper offered a comprehensive reliability assessment for two draglines currently operating in the Tunçbilek coal mine and discussed preventive replacement for wear-out components of the draglines considering cost factors.

Draglines, as massive and expensive stripping machines, are highly utilized in open cast mining to remove overburden. Reliabilities and availabilities of draglines play a critical role to sustain the continuity of overburden stripping and, hence, coal productions. Thorough understanding of the system and its components is required in order to accomplish high levels of availability and it can be achieved with an in depth reliability analysis. This study presents component-based reliability analysis of a walking dragline being operated in an open cast coal mine in Turkey. The main objective of the study is to understand the effects of each component or subsystem of a dragline on its reliability which will further provide insight into optimized maintenance schedule. The results of the study revealed that the system is expected to fail in 37.9 hours, most probably due to a failure in the rotation component of the movement subsystem. Dragging rope is predicted to have the highest contribution to number of failures within a year, but the motors and generators will cause the longest downtime if failed. Reliability importance (RI) values were also found to be useful to decide which components need attention at certain time intervals.

This paper investigates impacts of rock mass properties on dragline performance. Performances of two draglines operated in different rock formations in Tuncbilek Coal mines were analyzed using modified geological strengths index (GSI). Results showed that draglines’ performance change with the rock mass properties. Based on the available data, an empirical relationship was generated to estimate dragline production capacity. The estimated excavation amount by the proposed model was found to be consistent with the excavation amount obtained from the field data.

E3S Web of Conferences, open access proceedings in environment, energy and earth sciences

Overburden excavation is an integral component of the surface mine production chain. In large mines, the walking dragline is a dominant strip mining machine. Production engineers and operators must be guided by appropriate strategies to preserve the structural and operating performance of this equipment to justify its high capital investment. The dragline performance mainly depends on the spatial kinematics and dynamics of its front-end assembly. In this study, the authors developed the dynamic modelling of a dragline front-end assembly incorporating 2-D kinematics and bucket-formation interaction using numerical methods and dynamic simulation environment. Detailed analysis of the simulation results show that the maximum closure error from the model validation function is 4×10 E−8. The angular accelerations of the drag and hoist ropes are close to zero. The respective maximum drag, cutting and hoist forces are 100 kN, 200 kN and 75 kN. The results indicate machine health and longevity within the simulated conditions.