Assessment and Characterization of Airborne Dust in Coal Surface Mine

Abstract

Now a day’s dust pollution is the major environmental issue inside an opencast mine, which has various effects on human life. There are a number of fugitive sources, and activities which cause dust pollution inside an opencast mine eg. Drilling, transportation, blasting, crushing, conveying, overburden face, haul road etc. Among these dust, there are some toxic and carcinogenic dust which are when exposed to the workers that lead to different serious health effects like silicosis and lungs cancer. So measurement of these dust concentration is necessary to know the impact of various mining activity on the surrounding environment. From the above view, this current project mainly focuses on the dust sampling by using high volume dust sampler i.e. Envirotech APM 460 NL and Envirotech APM 550, measuring the personal dust exposure of different workmen at different mining sites by using Personal Dust Sampler (Model Arelco Ineris CIP 10), and characterization of the dust collected from the filter paper by using FTIR (Fourier Transform Infra-Red spectroscopy). For this purpose Lajkura Opencast Project was chosen which produces 30 MT of coal per year for convenience, because as it is a large opencast mine so better knowledge can be gained from this mine regarding the concentration and effects of the dust. The dust sampling and monitoring was conducted during the month of March 2016 to get a good assess of dust. From the measurement through Envirotech APM 460NL the dust concentration was found out to be 1074µg/m3 and 984 µg/m3, and through Envirotech APM 550 dust concentration is found out to be 196 µg/m3. Personal dust exposure is also measured and the measured concentration was found to vary between 0.8mg/m3 to 1.3 mg/m3. From the characterization of the dust sample the compound that we found are Silica, Sulfates, Sulfoxide, and Carboxylates etc.