Wireless Ventilation Control for Large-Scale Systems: the Mining Industrial Case

Mining ventilation is an interesting example of a large scale system with high environmental impact where advanced control strategies can bring major improvements. The challenge in this work is focused on the mining ventilation since as much as 50 % or more of the energy consumed by the mining process may go into the ventilation (including heating the air). It is clear that investigating automatic control solutions and minimizing the amount of pumped air to save energy consumption (proportional to the cube of airflow quantity) is of great environmental and industrial interest.