Shendong Coal Completed First Unmanned Working Face

On October 25, the Yujialiang coal mine of Shenhua Shendong Coal Group Co., Ltd. (“Shendong Coal” for short) under CHN Energy completed its first unmanned working face, achieving unmanned automatic monitoring in underground mining operations. The operator of the coal mining machine can use the “Smart Brain” centralized control system to control the underground working face from the intelligent centralized control center on the ground, thus achieving coal mining and full-process monitoring in a more efficient and intelligent way. This unmanned working face can not only reduce risks of underground miners, but also achieve the goal of unmanned safety management and control.

The development of the intelligent working face in the Yujialiang coal mine has undergone three phases: memory cutting+mining rig frame; memory cutting+mining rig frame+centralized control+panoramic video+remote intervention+human monitoring; automatic cutting+digital modeling+cutting model editing+AI intelligent recognition. Since the working face began trial operation, it has renewed single-shift records four times and achieved the goal of producing 12 cuts of coal each circular shift in a regular manner. This marked that the unmanned working face surpassed manned working face in terms of production efficiency for the first time.

Since 2018, the Yujialiang coal mine has implemented several intelligent research projects. Shendong Coal creatively introduced the automatic intelligent coal cutting technology, achieving “unmanned operation and manned patrol” of the working face and solving the problem of unrecognizable coal rocks that had plagued the coal industry for many years. With the advancement of intelligent technologies, the coal mine set the goal of “building a safe, efficient unmanned working face that is duplicable and applicable to industrialized use, without the need of manned monitoring, and able to regularly produce 12 cuts of coal each circular shift”. To this end, it named its college students intelligent coal mining team as the technology incubation and application team to lead other teams in overcoming technical bottlenecks. The team conducted 12 technical innovations on the intelligent 43207 working face, and solved 39 problems in the debugging process through technical optimization. They eventually realized intelligent operation featuring unmanned production, achieving a leapfrog breakthrough in which unmanned production surpassed manned coal cutting in terms of production efficiency.