Fire monitoring in coal mines using Wireless Sensor Networks

Fire is of major concern to those who work in underground coal mines. It is important to have a warning system that is capable of detecting fire and generating an alarm. In this paper, we present the design of an early warning system in a “Bord & Pillar” coal mine. It uses Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) to detect the exact fire location and spreading direction and also provide the fire prevention system to stop the spread of fire to save the natural resources and the mining personnel from fire. Simulation analysis results show that the average network delay varies almost linearly with the increase in the number of hops.