The Safety in Mines Testing and Research Station (Simtars) has developed the world’s most advanced mobile gas laboratory.

The fully automated lab, which took three years to develop, is fitted out with cutting edge mine safety technology.

The gas laboratory is designed to be rapidly deployed in an event of a mine emergency and could help to save lives.

Simtars executive director Paul Harrison, who was involved in the development of the mobile laboratory, said there was “nothing else quite like this in the world”.

Before the new laboratory, Simtars was relying on a semi-automated mobile lab it built in 1997.

Harrison said what made the new mobile gas laboratory so advanced was that it was fully automated for unmanned operation.

The heart of the mobile laboratory is a fully automated continuous monitoring system specifically designed for coal mines.

The system can be accessed and controlled remotely via the internet or satellite uplink.

Simtars has the option to leave the lab unmanned while having gas data flow back to a central control room or incident room anywhere in the country.

Harrison said the advantage of the lab being automated was that it could take gas samples continuously from up to 20 different locations in an underground mine, automatically analyse the samples, perform complex determinations of ratios and critical parameters and alert the incident management team to any serious problems.

“The more information you can gather in an emergency situation the better the quality of the decisions you make on the basis of that information are going to be,” he said.

The continuous sampling is achieved using a 20 point tube bundle system.

In addition, the mobile gas lab is equipped with the latest state-of-the-art analysis technology including infra-red gas analysers and ultrafast chromatographs.

The gas chromatograph can also analyse in real time hydrogen, nitrogen, ethylene, ethane and acetylene, and in turn provide critical information about fire indicators, ratios and explosibility.

It can give a result in about four or five minutes.

The laboratory is fitted with an on board diesel generator.

Harrison said an added benefit of the generator was that it could be running while the lab was driving to site, allowing the analysis instruments to be warmed up and stabilised ready for immediate use once the lab arrived at the mine.

He said the mobile gas laboratory could have been extremely useful following the tragic 2010 Pike River mine explosion, which left 29 people dead.

While the laboratory might not have averted the disaster, it could have enhanced the incident management team’s understanding of the atmospheric conditions underground.

It is not only the technology that puts the mobile lab at the forefront of all of its predecessors.

The $600,000 mobile lab has been fitted out with all the luxuries of home, including cooking appliances, televisions and bathroom utilities to comfortably house three people.

“The previous mobile lab we had was on the back of a truck so we thought this time we would make it a fifth wheeler, with living quarters at the front, so if you arrived at the mine site and couldn’t get local accommodation the team could stay in the mobile lab until accommodation became available,” Harrison said.

The mobile gas lab will be stationed at the Queensland Mines Rescue Service’s Dysart headquarters so it is near the underground coal mines in Queensland’s Bowen Basin.

It will be used in parallel with Simtars’ first response team, which usually arrives at the scene of a mine emergency within a matter of hours by government jet.

While Harrison hopes it will never be needed for an emergency, he says the mobile gas laboratory could be deployed almost as quickly as the first response team.

Published in the March 2012 Australian Longwall Magazine