Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 4 No. 4 Winter 2019 | Page 6

06
Associate Profes-
sor Aaron Noble,
mining and minerals
engineering; Assis-
tant Professor Shima
Shahab, mechanical
engineering; and
Reserach Scientist
Hassan Amini, MME.
ROSAIRE
BUSHEY
MECHANICAL
ENGINEERING
$900,000 Multi-disciplinary project
aims to make mining more efficient
For people who are involved with mining,
there are two things that are paramount to
an effective operation – efficiency, and safety,
and the industry is always looking for ways
to improve both. Researchers at Virginia
Tech are leading a multi-disciplinary team in
a three-year $900,000 project to improve the
efficiency of dust scrubbers in underground
mining operations.
Funded by the Alpha Foundation for the
Improvement of Mine Health and Safety,
Aaron Noble, associate professor, mining and
minerals engineering, is working with Shima
Shahab, assistant professor of mechanical
engineering, and Hassan Amini, a research
scientist with mining and minerals engineer-
ing, as well as collaborators from Michigan
Tech, and Cornell University.
“Underground mines make use of machines
called continuous miners that shave off layers
of coal or rock with a large cutting wheel at
its front,” said Noble, the project’s primary
investigator. “Scrubbers are a kind of dust
filter integrated into the design of the cutter.
As the machine advances it generates a lot of
its own vibrational energy. Part of what we’re
trying to do is to create a dust suppression
system that harvests that vibrational energy
to manipulate it in a way that is useful to the
suppression effort.”
Current dust collection systems require
multiple work stoppages during the course of
a day to replace and clean filters and hardware.
The team will incorporate new materials that
better collect dust, and use the continuous
miner’s vibrations to help keep the filters from