Vol 43 Iss. 1

At present, when the Soviet coal industry has entered a new phase of development, based on the construction of new large mines and increasing the capacity of existing mines, it is of some interest to consider from the point of view of the history of the development of our coal industry existing theoretical views on the method of determining the production capacity of mines.

All known in mining engineering calculation methods of choosing the size of the mine field are based on the desire to ensure the average minimum cost of production for the entire life of the mine and differ among themselves mainly in technique and calculation methodology. A large number of methods are based on a given life of the mine, and in this case, the task of choosing the parameters of the mine field is reduced to determining the relationship between the size of the field along the strike and fall.

Questions of improvement of methods of development of coal deposits in various conditions of occurrence are now quite often discussed in our technical literature. However, these issues are most widely considered only for declivity seams. We will try to at least partially fill this gap on one of the most important issues - improving the system of development of steep seams of the Central region of Donbass, dangerous for coal and gas emissions.

The decisions of the XXI Congress of the CPSU on its Miletky plan for 1959-1965 provide for further increase in coal production by 21-23%, mainly due to the development of the eastern regions of the country, including Kuzbass.Coal reserves of Kuzbass are concentrated mainly in the Prokopiev-Kiselevsky district, located in the south-western part of the basin. The strata of this region lie in the form of a number of synclinal folds with angles of inclination of wings, as a rule, 50°-70° In some cases they decrease to 40°, in others they increase to 90°; in the lock parts of folds the angles of dip of strata decrease to 10° Coal deposits of the region are opened by a large number of active mines and exploration wells, which allowed to trace quite accurately the deposits of the region at depths of more than 1000 meters.

A large amount of work in the construction of mines, as is known, falls on mining operations, and the greatest complexity and labor intensity is the conduct of vertical shafts. In recent years, many new machines, mechanisms and different types of equipment have been created, which allowed to significantly increase the rate of mining excavations, in particular vertical shafts. So, according to D. I. Maliovanov, in the coal industry with an increase in the volume of sinking vertical shafts from 5958 meters in 1946 to 20 724 meters in 1956. The level of mechanization of rock loading increased from 2.3% in 1948 to 87.4% in 1956. Maximum rates of vertical shaft sinking increased from 69.4 m in 1946 to 202.1 m in 1955, 241.1 m in 1957 and 264.6 m in 1959.

In his works Boris Ivanovich Bokiy paid great attention to the issues of roof management and fastening, attached great importance to the introduction of metal fasteners for the mine faces and predicted its widespread use in the future. B. I. Bokii conducted observations of roof behavior at the Ivan mine (about a year). Naturally, in his works B. I. Bokii proceeded from the ideas of a flat problem.

Historical reviews of the development of exploration in Russia and the USSR always mention the name of B. I. Bokii. It is usually noted that in his famous course “Fundamentals of Mining Engineering” a special chapter is devoted to exploration, where a number of geological exploration operations (drilling, sinking of mine workings) are considered and the question of some exploration systems depending on the thickness of sediments, the depth of the weathering zone, and the elements of mineral and host rock occurrence is solved. There is no doubt that this chapter is a generalization of the practice of exploration, mainly of coal deposits, in pre-revolutionary Russia. It laid the foundation for the development of exploration systems depending on the geological features of the deposit and the economic factor. In fact, the development of such systems is one of the main tasks of further development of exploration. In this case, B. I. Bokii solves one of the systems for the case of monoclinal occurrence of a suite of formation bodies, determining for different angles of inclination of rocks, sediment thickness and depth of the weathering zone the most favorable types of excavations (trenches, pits, pits with coverslags and boreholes), their depths and location (distance) in the exploration lines from each other. This decision, especially with regard to the rational distance between excavations, remains unchanged until now in many training manuals in terms of prospecting and exploration of reservoir mineral deposits.

The idea of underground gasification of coals was first expressed by D. I. Mendeleev in 1818. I. Mendeleev in 1882-1888. In 1913. Lenin in his article “One of the great victories of technology” highly appreciated the idea of underground coal gasification, anticipating that under socialism it could be put at the service of society. Vladimir Ilyich believed that with underground gasification it is possible to obtain cheap combustible gas underground and, burning it in the furnaces of boilers, to have cheap electricity at power plants. With the help of underground gasification of coals, in his opinion, it would be possible to use even the poorest and undeveloped deposits of hard coal. He pointed out: “A huge mass of human labor used for mining and transportation of hard coal would be saved”.

The Donetsk basin, which provided fuel for almost all of Russia, during the years of the Civil War fell into a severe decline, from which it began to recover only recently. However, the reduction of the metallurgical industry and the decrease of railroad transportation - these two main consumers of mineral fuel - forced the Administration of the United Coal Industry of Donbass not to develop production as much as it was possible due to the state of the equipment, the quality of the coal reserves opened and prepared by the existing mines and other technical reasons. The desire to reduce the cost of coal in order to make it more accessible to a wide range of consumers, and the desire to get rid of heavy overhead costs forced the Directorate to concentrate productivity on a relatively small number of mines, to liquidate or put the rest in a state of conservation.

Boris I. Bokii was born on July 23, 1873 in Tiflis, where his father was a teacher of a real school. Boris I. Bokii received his secondary education in Izium real school, which he graduated from in 1890. In the same year B. I. Bokii entered the St. Petersburg Mining Institute by competition and graduated in 1890. I. Bokiy entered the St. Petersburg Mining Institute by competition, which he graduated in 1895 in the first category, having received the qualification of mining engineer.

Heartfelt warm feelings for the deeply respected Professor Boris Ivanovich Boiky, whom I knew for many years and under whose guidance I worked at the Ivan mine (now the Lenin mine) in 1901-1902, are memorable not only to me, but also to many miners who personally knew B.I. Boiky.