IoT BASED AIR QUALITY MONITORING AND CONTROLLING IN UNDERGROUND MINES

Abstract

Working in a heavy-duty and harsh air environment especially in the underground is not easy to practice especially with its huge risks. In fact, the mining type of work makes it more complicated and has to be sophisticated to overcome those hazards. Where, there are various risks and threats in the underground environment that face the mine workers and machineries such as varying oxygen gas concentration, toxic gases, flammable gases, heat, and humidity. In fact, the variation and sudden changes of those factors have effects on both cases such as increased or decreased and exist on the human as workers, machines, and materials. On the other side, this paper adopts various concepts such as Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoT).  In the implementation perspective, this paper is implemented in Arduino UNO along with the various sensors for desired parameters and using ESP8266-01 as a WIFI module to provide a communication to the internet (IoT platform). In fact, the used IoT platform here is the ThingSpeak platform to perform as an observing dashboard and controlling channel. The paper is considered as four nodes, where two nodes are used for data collection and others are used for controlling the devices. The first two nodes collect data such as Oxygen gas (O₂), Methane (CH₄) deficiency in air, Carbon Monoxide (CO) deficiency in air, temperature, and humidity of the air. On the other side, the last two nodes are used to control the ventilation and siren systems of the mine.