Modelling potential action for building protection against flow of methane from the underground using the Fluent software

The paper deals with the issue of the drift of residual methane release from the extracted seams of the underground coal mines. Methane is a hazardous gas, which, thanks to its density, tends to gather under the ceilings of mine shafts or rooms where it is present. When mixed with air, it is explosive within the 5 - 15 % range and that is the reason for the highly hazardous nature of the given gas despite the fact that under normal conditions, it is not dangerous for people. The objective of the present paper is to examine, using numerical gas glow modelling a potential building protection design for buildings located in areas with terminated mining activity and thus exposed to the risk of methane ingress and, as the case may be, causing in estimable losses of property or even human lives. The exclusiveness of our approach involves the effort at visualising and showing how the gas will behave in a porous environment in the model situations we put to the test. Unless numerical flow technology, generally referred to as CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software, is used, the situation in the underground may practically never be identified and it is specifically thanks to the use of the Fluent software that we can theoretically model and subsequently realise how the surrounding conditions may change and affect flow from the underground to the surface and change the immediate conditions there. The Gambit software tool was used when creating the geometrical model of the working area; the CFD Fluent software by ANSYS, Inc. was used to model gas flow.