New in Ventsim DESIGN 5.4, 2023 edition

[Martin Griffith]

It’s time for another post about what’s new in Ventsim. What’s below builds on what was shown the last time I did one of these posts (New in Ventsim 5.4 - Ventsim News - Ventilation & Flow Simulation Forums (invisionzone.com) and what we showed on the release of Ventsim DESIGN 5.4 (What’s new in Ventsim 5.4! | Ventsim) .

Most of this is based on your feedback and questions, through support, meeting you at conferences and training courses.

So please get in touch if there is something that you’d like to see in Ventsim that we haven’t thought of yet.

Get the latest version here! : Patches | Ventsim

Waterways

Based on user feedback, we’ve made some recent improvements to the Waterways feature. Extra features include the ability to set different flow rates at the start and end of the waterway; the solver will then add in extra water along the waterway. You would do this in a situation where you have regular ingress of water along the path, with the volume increasing over distance. We’ve also added an option to cut the latent heat from the waterway, which can serves as a rough model of a waterway with a cover.

 

Heaters

 

We’ve made improvements to the Heater function. We’ve improved the calculation to correctly handle moisture from the heater from the Direct Burner option. Also, we’ve added an option to run an Electric Heater, on top of the existing option of Direct and Indirect burner options. Of course this reports the electricity usage, rather than the fuel usage, both on the Edit Box and in any graphs from the Annual Flywheel Heat Simulation. We’ve also made the Direct Burn option add gases during a Gas or Diesel Simulation.

 

Reporting

We’ve made improvements to the summary form, which now can report Production from any Stoping or Development Advance Rates that you’ve added to your model through the Heat tab of the Edit Box.

 

Colour-blocking

You may have noticed there is now an extra button on the Display Manager. This is a toggle for going between blocked and graded colours. Click it on and off and it will make sense. This is useful for when you’re interested in hard boundaries and thresholds on properties, such as maximum allowable velocities or gas levels.

 

Diesel and DPM improvements

We’ve been working on the Diesel Simulation, as it’s something we hear about a lot. Run your Diesel Simulation and it will automatically track the usage of fresh air by diesel sources. This is a great way of tracking the local usage of air and whether the (common) 0.06 (m3/s/)/kW requirement of fresh air for diesel machines is being satisfied locally. For jurisdictions which don’t use this airflow requirement method, it still gives you an idea of the fresh air usage in your mine. The fresh air deficit warning will appear wherever a diesel source causes the Fresh Air Surplus to go below zero.

We’ve also added properties for dynamic maximums and averages of DPM from the Dynamic Simulation. This is for those users who are running Dynamic Diesel Simulations with moving diesel sources and want to get an idea the temporal variations of DPM, in comparison to the steady-state Diesel Simulation.

 

Automatically generate stages from airway ages.

We’ve added a feature to the Stage Menu that will assign the selected airways to a stage based on the Simulation Year of the stage and the data mined of the airway. This is a great way of quickly generating stages over the lifecycle of the mine.

Convert Overpass

For those users who can’t get enough of the Convert to Overpass tool, we’ve made it so it works on already intersected airways. This gets rid of the hassle of deleting and redrawing airways when wanting to create an overpass from existing airways.

 

 

Advanced Message Box

Based on feedback, we’ve made the Advanced Message Boxes more intuitive and streamlined; now the message automatically generates text for you. 

 

That's the main improvements, but there are of course a range of other improvements and bug fixes throughout, so we encourage you to update to the latest version. As always, any questions, you can respond here or contact us at ventsim.support@howden.com. We rely on your feedback to make the software better, so please tell us if there is something you would like to see in Ventsim.