| Summary: | Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015 As open pit mines continue to grow deeper and productivity continues to increase, the management of air pollution can become challenging. One of the challenges, common during winter in deep open pit mines operating in the Arctic, is the occurrence of atmospheric inversion. In itself, inversion is not hazardous. However, due to the emission of gases and particulates during the mining process, the air within the pit can be severely contaminated, rather quickly, leading to serious health and safety consequences. The problem is complex and any solution approach will require a good understanding of the interaction of the aerodynamic movement of air, the air inversion process, the meteorology, the pollutant sources, and the application of mechanical ventilators in open pit mines. Scientific literature related to open pit mine ventilation, particularly with respect to air inversion, is practically non-existent in the English literature. This is perhaps the first account of a three dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of pollutant transport in an actual open pit mine under an Arctic air inversion. Advanced technology has made computers faster and more powerful, which allows computational fluid dynamics (CFD) procedures to be applied to many air flow problems. Thus, a CFD approach can be used to understand the transport of contaminant in the pit during inversion by using several turbulence models. An array of data is required to develop CFD models for open pit mine ventilation. The meteorological conditions within deep open pit mines are significantly affected by temperature and roughness conditions, which ultimately generate complex dispersion phenomena including separation of air flow and its recirculation. For the application of CFD, various data such as pollutants concentrations, temperature, velocity, pit contours, equipment locations, and radiation (shortwave and longwave) were collected from the selected open pit mine and the weather ...
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