Study on respiratory deposition doses of typical Indian opencast coal mineworkers using occupational particulate matter levels

This study investigates the particulate matter (PM0.5, PM0.5-1, PM1-2.5, and PM2.5-10) exposure in MEs of opencast coal mines near Dhanbad, India. The present study estimates the respiratory deposition doses (RDD) to mineworkers exposed under standard working scenarios at the worksite during day time shift (DTS). The coarser mode particle mass concentration (PMC) and particle number concentration (PNC) are 1.4 to 10.6 and 2 to 7.5 times higher within mines at active mining locations, whereas accumulation mode PMC and PNC is 1.1 to 1.5 and 1.1 to 1.9 times higher outside the mines. The opencast mining-associated activities like the excavation of coal and overburden contribute more to the coarser fraction of particles. However, accumulation mode PMC and PNC dominates at locations with no such mining activities except dumper operations. The average RDD of PMC and PNC during DTS to mineworkers varies from 320.97 μg DTS-1 and 3.69 ×108 # DTS-1 and 3835.71 μg DTS-1 and 8.79 ×108 # DTS-1 respectively. The occupational RDD results reveal that onsite maintenance workers (OM) category of mineworkers are more vulnerable to accumulation mode PMC followed by blasting associated mineworkers (B), onsite executives (EM), maintenance workers (workshop) (MW), monitoring workers (M), HEMMs operators (O), workers at gathering point (G), and official executives (EO). Whereas OM category of workers is more vulnerable to coarser mode PMC followed by B, M, EM, O, MW, G, and EO category of minewo...
Source: Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health - Category: Environmental Health Source Type: research