As highlighted by the resurgence of occupational lung diseases among miners in the United States and Australia, respirable coalmine dust (RCMD) exposures remain a significant risk. A thorough understanding of RCMD composition and source contributions is critical to elucidating the disease factors in particular regions and improving dust controls and exposure prevention measures. To this end, there have been growing calls for new monitoring technologies.
While recent advances have enabled continuous measurements of RCMD mass concentration, capabilities for tracking specific dust constituents are still needed. In particular, real-time (or near real-time) measurement of the mineral content in RCMD would be valuable since certain mineral constituents such as crystalline silica are considered more hazardous than others.