Impact Problems in Mine Shafts

Personnel or ore-carrying conveyances traveling up and down mine shafts can experience a loss of control or encounter other emergency situations where its travel must then be slowed down and stopped. The methods to achieve this depend on how much damage to the conveyance and the impacted supporting structure can be tolerated and accepted by the design engineer. This paper examines several simplified methods of determining braking and impact forces of traveling conveyances. The first method assumes that no damage to the supporting structure occurs. The second method assumes that a portion of the impacting force is absorbed by elastomeric material placed on top of the supports. The third method gives an approximate way of estimating the damage to the impacted structure necessary to completely stop the conveyance. Numerical examples are presented to show the proposed procedures. These approximate methods should be considered as a first attempt to estimate the response of a complex problem.