Heat loads, associated with auto-compression, geothermal gradient activity, and mining equipment, can lead to high temperatures underground that require mitigation and/or refrigeration in order to create a safe working environment for miners. In this paper, temperature levels associated with heat generated from equipment and other sources are incorporated into a medium-term production scheduling optimization model (Ogunmodede et al, 2022). The resulting schedule considers temperature by production level and determines refrigeration requirements, if applicable, based on the ventilation capacity, production rates, and equipment usage. This tool can be used to evaluate numerous production and ventilation scenarios to make production-related decisions. Using a realistic dataset from an underground mine, numerous scenarios are evaluated to understand the impacts of various equipment heat loads and ventilation settings to illustrate the impacts of heat on the production schedule.
