New Government-Built Miner’s Lamp Improves Underground Safety

To improve safety in mines, the venerable miner’s lamp – which in its earliest years burned oil to produce light - is getting an upgrade with programmable-type LEDs, Light Emitting Diodes that offer strong light, produce no heat and use little power. Underground mines, including silver mines, are the most difficult environment to illuminate, according to the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America. Illumination greatly affects miners’ ability to perform their jobs safely. Typically, a miner’s cap lamp is the primary and most important source of light. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has built a LED cap lamp design that it says improves worker safety by better distributing light using specialized, programmable optics. This helps workers see the immediate hazards in their surroundings more easily. Test results comparing the NIOSH cap lamp to commercially available LED cap lamps show detection time improvements of up to 194 percent in floor hazard detection and up to 79 percent in peripheral motion detection, and as much as 54 percent reduction in disability glare. NIOSH expects that workers in other industries and sectors such as military, security and search and rescue will benefit from the LED cap lamp.