China faces a challenge in the sustainable development of the coal industry due to pneumoconiosis problems. Dust control technologies are crucial for safe production and miners’ health, ensuring the industry’s longevity. This article reviews the development process of dust prevention and control in underground coal mines in China, summarizes various technologies, and divides them into dust suppression, open-space dust reduction, and mine dust collectors according to different stages and environments of use. In dust suppression technologies, coal-seam water injection can reduce total dust generation by 60%, wet rock drilling can reduce drilling dust in the presence of stable water sources and high-pressure bearing equipment, and water-seal blasting can reduce blasting dust by 50–70%. In open-space dust reduction technologies, spray dust suppression can remove total dust by 50–95% and the removal efficiencies of foam dedusting for total and respirable dust are reported to reach 95% and 85% under the right conditions, respectively. In dust collector technologies, dry collectors can remove 80–95% of total dust. Wet collectors achieve up to 90% efficiency, dependent on water supply and waste processing. This article also discusses vapor heterogeneous condensation technology as a promising method for improving respirable dust removal in humid mine environments.

Ventilation Air Methane (VAM) from mining operations, typically containing less than 1% methane, remains a significant yet underexploited contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. This study develops and evaluates an innovative system designed to harness the energy contained in low-concentration VAM. The proposed concept combusts VAM directly to generate thermal energy, which is subsequently stored as compressed air and later converted to electricity using a novel in-house buoyancy-driven power generator (BPG). System performance was modelled and optimised in Aspen Plus V15, incorporating a user-defined module to account for the BPG power generation. The BPG, equipped with a movable piston, achieved an energy conversion efficiency of 66%. Parametric simulations and optimisation yielded a maximum overall system efficiency of 7%. Although its efficiency is comparable to existing VAM utilisation technologies, the system offers notable advantages in simplicity and operational flexibility, eliminating the need for auxiliary components such as methane mixers, thereby reducing overall footprint and potentially CapEx. The movable BPG unit also enables modular, on-demand energy storage and utilisation, making the system well-suited for small- to medium-scale applications.

Much dust is generated in coal mining underground work processes, posing threats to workers’ health and safety production. Dust enters the human body mainly through inhalation, which is primarily determined by the dust concentration around workers. In this study, the airflow field and dust distribution in the tunnel are simulated by Fluent software. The breathing zone for a worker was defined to clarify the extent of external dust distribution influencing dust inhalation. The effects of human respiration, dust production rates, air supply velocities, and workers’ positions on dust concentration in the breathing zone were investigated. The results show that there is upward airflow around the worker standing in the center of the air circulation. Human inhalation and exhalation barely influence the airflow distribution and respirable dust concentrations in the breathing zone. Reducing the dust production rate in the tunnel can reduce the respirable dust concentration in the breathing zone by almost the same proportion. While increasing the air supply velocity by 50% would reduce only 20% dust in the breathing zone. The dust concentrations vary along the roadway, in which the low concentration zone is located in the middle, more than 1.0 m away from the dust-producing surface and the wind surface.

Ventilation Air Methane (VAM) from mining operations, typically containing less than 1% methane, remains a significant yet underexploited contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. This study develops and evaluates an innovative system designed to harness the energy contained in low-concentration VAM. The proposed concept combusts VAM directly to generate thermal energy, which is subsequently stored as compressed air and later converted to electricity using a novel in-house buoyancy-driven power generator (BPG). System performance was modelled and optimised in Aspen Plus V15, incorporating a user-defined module to account for the BPG power generation. The BPG, equipped with a movable piston, achieved an energy conversion efficiency of 66%. Parametric simulations and optimisation yielded a maximum overall system efficiency of 7%. Although its efficiency is comparable to existing VAM utilisation technologies, the system offers notable advantages in simplicity and operational flexibility, eliminating the need for auxiliary components such as methane mixers, thereby reducing overall footprint and potentially CapEx. The movable BPG unit also enables modular, on-demand energy storage and utilisation, making the system well-suited for small- to medium-scale applications.