Greetings and salutations L. Masperi from my corner of the soon to be frozen wilderness @1140 feet above mean sea level.

You need to stay with the high CFM figure to ventilate the tube proir to and during entry of the reclaim tunnel as it is very long in length. That is unless you have an escape tube leaving the tail pulley end of the reclaim but by your description you do not apparently.

1. purchase mine ventilation tubing (brattice cloth tubing for the fan moving the air into the tube) the brattice cloth tubing is connected to the business end of the fans discharge and can be connected together for thousands of feet as the sections are designed to to connect to each other and allow for fresh air ventilation at the mine face.

It comes in many sizes and lengths along with a long list of maufacturers-(peobody is one) and obtaining it will be no problem.

A mine ventilation fan for this reclaim tunnell will no be a problem either and they are available through mining equipment dealers on the continent-assuming you are in europe, joy and atlas copco are two very reputable firms in the mining scene in europe and they can help you with this procurement easily along with the purchase of the bratice cloth tubing for the reclaim tunnel.

Typically mine fans are 480-600 volt 60 cycle three phase power

but they will be 50 cycle three phase in europe unless your electrical is 60 cycle.

The fan can be placed outside the reclaim out of the way with only the tubing entering the tunnel and being attached to the roof.

This can be circumvented if the reclaim belt is hung from the roof by leaving the tubing on the floor of the reclaim tunnel and anchoring it to the wall.

The distance you are moving the fresh air in the tube will be no problem for a small mine ventilation fan requiring 15,000 cubic feet per minute for ventialtion of the reclaim tunnel.

In regard to installation of the tubing for the reclaim tunnel:

in mining situations:

Ventilation tubing either solid or brattice cloth is suspended in the tunnel roof and carried by a small wire rope anchored to the ceiling if the tunnel with a mechanical roof bolt anchorage or ram set pin and this allows full access to tunnel by mining machinery.

Brattice cloth tubing has hanger hole grommets woven into the brattice cloth to allow easy installation and removal-solid tubing is made with hangers molded right in the tube for installation of the tubing.

The tube is connected to the wire rope by a heavy hook to hold it in place and it stays there untill it is removed.

The joy or atlas copco folks will be able to help you with this very quickly.

If your reclaim tunnel is 60,000 cubic meters in volume you will need the larger fan volume figure for ventilation simply due to carbon dioxide buildup from personell working in the tunnel, potential bad gas build up due to the underground nature of the tube and the occasional piece of mobile machinery if needed.

The other viable option is installing an escape tube out of corrugated steel culvert pipe at the tail pulley end of the reclaim with a fan in the top of the tube pulling in fresh air all the time and allowing for egress/escape by ladder in the event of a collapse of the reclaim tunnel.

lzaharis ■