Abstract

Current innovations and technological advances in underground coal mines have contributed significantly toward sustainable extraction and productivity. However, equipment such as the continuous miner is highly underutilized due to spatial restriction and suboptimal practices. Support systems such as the cut-out distance and panel dimensions can be optimized to maximize equipment utilization and consequently increase the production rate. This paper implements an ad hoc analytical framework to evaluate and determine the optimum cut-out distance for maximum coal production. The objective of this work is to determine the optimum cut-out distance, panel width, and fleet size for maximum coal production. A real room and pillar coal mining system were evaluated using discrete event simulation. The results show that for the system evaluated an 11-entry panel width with a fleet size of three shuttle cars is optimum for the variable cut-out distances examined. The utilization of the continuous miner and production rate increases by 6% at a maximum cut-out distance of 12.19 m.