IoT based Safety System for Coal Mines

Coal is one of the most important fuel sources and is of paramount importance to many industries, often regarded by many as Black Diamond. It is the most important indigenous energy resource available in the world. Digging up more and more coal has become a national priority for India as it tries to meet its ever-increasing demand for electricity. But for the people who do this job, it is a dangerous and potentially lethal assignment. Workers in coal mines face many environment related problems such as high temperature, humidity, release of harmful gases to name a few. These factors create a rather dangerous environment for workers to work in and thus poses a serious risk to their very lives.As a means of reducing the intensity of the problem, we have developed a model which senses these environmental parameters from different locations in the mines and sends alerts to the mines control room so that appropriate actions can be taken whenever there seems to be a dangerous situation. Here NodeMCU is used as an MQTT publisher for these parameters sensed by the different sensors. The values of these parameters from different mine locations are sent via MQTT, by being subscribed by a Raspberry Pi which acts as an MQTT broker here. When these values exceed certain threshold values, an alert by email can be sent to the mine control office so that required actions can be taken. This also generates an alarm for the workers to evacuate the place. This published data can also be stored in files for data collection and big data analytics so that more efficient systems can be developed to improve the efficiency and reduce the risk of workers potentially losing their lives.