Dispersing methane to a safer level is crucial for mines safety as methane has been the greatest contributor of explosion hazard in underground coal mines worldwide. Methane dispersion is affected by several geo-mining factors. This study is first of its kind, which makes an attempt to develop a model for predicting methane concentration in underground coal mines based on seven different geo-mining factors using multi-layered artificial neural networks. The main objective is to quantify the relative influences of these factors on methane dispersion in underground coal mines and identify the significant factors through sensitivity analysis. Three different architectures of neural networks were trained using the methane dispersion data generated through computational fluid dynamics simulations conducted at varied geo-mining conditions. Principal component analysis on the input set was done for dimensionality reduction, which reduced the number of variables to seven from eight while maintaining a variance of 99%. All the models performed very well, and the best model yielded mean square error of 0.0304 and R² of 0.942. The study unveiled some new facts on the relative effects of ventilation type and surface roughness on methane dispersion. It established that air velocity is the most significant and surface roughness of mine galley is the least significant factor affecting methane dispersion in underground coal mines with relative importance of 0.25 and 0.01, respectively. The outcome of this study will be useful in design of mine ventilation system for effective coal mine methane management and enhancing mines safety.

将甲烷分散到更安全的水平对于煤矿安全至关重要，因为甲烷一直是全球地下煤矿爆炸危险的最大贡献者。甲烷的扩散受多种矿山开采因素的影响。这项研究尚属首次，它试图使用多层人工神经网络基于七个不同的地理开采因素，开发一种预测地下煤矿甲烷浓度的模型。主要目的是量化这些因素对地下煤矿瓦斯扩散的相对影响，并通过敏感性分析确定重要因素。使用在不同的采矿条件下进行的计算流体动力学模拟生成的甲烷扩散数据，对神经网络的三种不同架构进行了训练。对输入集进行主成分分析以降低维数，从而将变量数从八个减少到七个，同时保持99％的方差。所有模型的表现都非常好，最佳模型的均方误差为0.0304和R ²为0.942。该研究揭示了有关通风方式和表面粗糙度对甲烷扩散的相对影响的一些新事实。结果表明，风速是影响地下煤矿瓦斯扩散的最重要因素，而厨房的表面粗糙度则是影响最小的因素，相对重要性分别为0.25和0.01。这项研究的结果将有助于设计煤矿通风系统，以有效管理煤矿瓦斯并提高煤矿安全性。