WV Coal Mining

China has experienced huge casualties from mining disasters, with over 9,000 deaths in year 2006 according to the official statistics, the government has pressured the larger mining operators to install mining safety monitoring system while shutting down the smaller mines. For any system to go to market, they must first be certified for Anti-explosion Safety and System Reliability, sponsored by Institute of Coal Research. While the MSHA certification seems to focus much more on anti-explosion safety side.

There are about 20 firms in China providing mining safety monitoring systems, most of them use RFID based technology. Only three firms, including (Firm 1) and (Firm 2), mentioned below, employing Zigbee technology. A system will need a reader (base station) every 100 meters. The main cost difference of the two technologies is that:

• RFID device for each mining worker is very cheap, but the commercial viable RFID reader (base station) is more expensive at RMB 20,000 each.
• Zigbee device for each mining worker is more expensive, but the Zigbee reader (base station) is more expensive at RMB 4,000 each (cost of RMB 600 each).

For the system to have no blind spot in coverage, (Firm 3) believes that the Zigbee-based system is less expensive. Zigbee also supports two-way communication, while RFID is only one-way.