Underground » Coal Burst
The original concept for this project was simply to work out how to provide an enhanced hearing capacity so that miners could listen to the sound of breaking and dilating coal and rock as a precursor to outbursts. It was and is thought that they could use this information along with visual indicators to work out if it was safe to approach the face after remote mining.
The project experienced a range of complicating factors but has achieved some physical and electronic design which is sufficient to know what needs to be done next.
This design uses some almost forgotten technologies such as analogue signal processing and radio transmission at lower frequencies than the current fashion for those in the gigahertz range. These bring the advantage of reduced data volume for transmission and the ability to transmit around bends.