Wireless Monitoring of Environmental Parameters for Underground Mining using Internet of Things with LoRa Transceiver Module

Abstract

The mining industry is known for valuable minerals all over the world and the way to get minerals is by mining below the surface. The production, productivity, and safety of underground mine environments are affected by the environmental factors of the mines. Mining in underground areas is at high risk with high accident rates due to environmental conditions such as dust, flammable gasses, and toxic gases exposed to workers. The other environmental factors that affect underground mines are temperature, humidity, air pressure, and fire. The proposed system makes use of the Internet of Things (IoT) with Long Range (LoRa) wireless communication technology in the underground mining environment to build an effective mine safety system. In this paper 433 MHz, Long Range (LoRa) transceiver module integrated with DHT 22 temperature sensor is used to monitor temperature and humidity implemented at a specific location to collect real-time environmental parameters. The results demonstrate that sensed environmental parameters data is acquired in real-time to monitor data with a certain distance from the transmitter in a wireless environment. The system can extend to raise an early warning of any hazardous events with the integration of gas sensors and also can connect the LoRa module gateway to a cloud database to monitor data from anywhere and at any time. The developed LoRa-based system can deploy in an underground mining area to monitor the real-time environmental parameters from the surface of the mine site by supervisors to avoid any hazards. © 2022 IEEE.