Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Safety lamp
Summary
A safety lamp is any of several types of lamp that provides illumination in places such as coal mines where the air may carry coal dust or a build-up of inflammable gases, which may explode if ignited, possibly by an electric spark. Until the development of effective electric lamps in the early 1900s, miners used flame lamps to provide illumination. Open flame lamps could ignite flammable gases which collected in mines, causing explosions; safety lamps were developed to enclose the flame to prevent it from igniting the explosive gases. Flame safety lamps have been replaced for lighting in mining with sealed explosion-proof electric lights, but continue to be used to detect gases.
Miners have traditionally referred to the various gases encountered during mining as damps, from the Middle Low German word dampf (meaning "vapour"). Damps are variable mixtures and are historic terms.
Firedamp - Naturally occurring flammable mixtures, principally methane.
Blackdamp or Chokedamp - Nitrogen and carbon dioxide with no oxygen. Formed by complete combustion of firedamp or occurring naturally. Coal in contact with air will oxidize slowly and, if unused workings are not ventilated, pockets of blackdamp may develop. Also referred to as azotic air in some 19th-century papers.
Whitedamp - Formed by the incomplete combustion of coal, or firedamp. The mixture may contain significant amounts of carbon monoxide, which is toxic and potentially explosive.
Stinkdamp - Naturally occurring hydrogen sulphide and other gases. The hydrogen sulphide is highly toxic, but easily detected by smell. The other gases with it may be firedamp or blackdamp.
Afterdamp - The gas from an explosion of firedamp or coal dust. Contains varying proportions of blackdamp and whitedamp and is therefore suffocating, toxic, or explosive, or any combination of these. Afterdamp may also contain stinkdamp. Afterdamp may be a bigger killer following an explosion than the explosion itself.
Before the invention of safety lamps, miners used candles with open flames.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.