• Question: what are the postives of being able to build computer models of coal mines ect..?

    Asked by bethbraithwaite to Davie, Gemma, James P, James V, Nuala on 26 Jun 2012.
    • Photo: Nuala Carson

      Nuala Carson answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hey bethbraithwaite,

      I cant say about coal mining specifically but I can tell you the benefits of computer models more generally. I use a computer model for my work so I know just how powerful they are.

      The one real benefit of a computer model is that it allows you to work out what has happened thousands of years ago without ever being there. It also allows you to predict what will happen thousands of years in the future.

      For example lets take the weather. Say you are having a BBQ on Saturday and want to know if its going to be sunny or if it is going to rain you check the weather forecast right? Well they use computer models to work out how the weather is going to change over the next few days, and with out them we wouldn’t be able to say what the weather would be like in 1 hour let alone at the weekend! We use the same idea to work how how the earths climate is going to change. That is how we found out that it is going to become warmer because of all of the carbon dioxide we are putting into the atmosphere.

      I suppose computer models could be used to predict where we would find coal in the future whihc would prevent the coal companies digging up lots of different places to try and find it.

      Hope this helps!

    • Photo: James Pope

      James Pope answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi bethbraithwaite,

      Computer models allow us to get a better understanding of things we can’t see or experiment on. So a computer model of climate allows us to experiment with what will happen or has happened to the climate, which is great as we can’t do this on the planet.

      With systems of coal, oil or gas we can’t see them, but we can find out information about the rocks they are in or surronded by and by putting this information into a computer model geologists for the oil, gas or coal industries know where to drill to get at the resource and also to know how much they can get out. The amount they can get out is vital, because the process of drilling and finding it is very expensive, it may cost £100 million to drill into an oil field, so if the value of the oil is only £50 million it’s not worth drilling as you will lose money, but if its £200 million you make a huge profit.

      Computer models are a vital tool in lots of different branches of science modelling from the large scale features of the climate down to the movement of sand grains in a river or electrons around an atom.

    • Photo: James Verdon

      James Verdon answered on 26 Jun 2012:

      Hi guys,
      Good guesses there fellow scientists, but the main reason we build computer models of coal mines is to model the stress changes caused by mining, so that we can predict whether cave-ins and collapses will occur.

      When you mine coal (or anything) from underground, you create gaps. The rocks above obviously then want to fall into the gaps. Do you remember the recent incident in the Chilean mine, where those miners were buried for ages?

      Whether or not a cave-in occurs is controlled by the stress conditions. Because it can be difficult to measure the stress all round the mine, we build computer models to estimate how the stress is changing. We can then identify any bits of the mine that have very high stress and are in particular danger, and can take steps to make these areas safer, to stop collapses from happening.

      We do a similar thing for oil and gas reservoirs. As we pump fluids into and out of these reservoirs, we change the stress in and around the reservoir. If their are faults nearby this could trigger small earthquakes, which would damage the reservoirs. So we create models to check that what we want to do isn’t likely to trigger anything like that.

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