Proceedings of the 9th China-Russia Symposium "Coal in the 21st Century: Mining, Intelligent Equipment and Environment Protection" (COAL 2018)

The Ninth China-Russia Conference (NCRC 2018) will be held on October 18-21, 2018 in Qingdao, China. The conference is an international forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results in the fields of mining, intelligent equipment and environmental protection. This conference was organized by Shandong University of Science and Technology, China and co-sponsored by T.F. Gorbachev Kuzbass State Technical University, Russia.

With the rapid development of society and economy, new problems have appeared in coal mining, and new theories and new technologies have emerged. The conference invited well-known scholars from China and Russia to make academic reports in relevant fields in order to better promote the development of mining, intelligent equipment and environmental protection, and promote academic exchanges between the two countries.

In this conference, we received about 125 papers from China and Russia submitted to the conference. By recommendation of symposium organizers and after the peer-review processes, the submitted papers were selected on the basis of originality, significance, and clarity for the purpose of the conference; finally, 67 papers are accepted and published in the present proceedings and the authors have been invited to present their papers on the conference by oral and poster presentation. We hope that this collection of papers will contribute in stimulating debate among scholars, researchers and academicians and we aspire that you find them interesting and thought-provoking.

We would like to thank the organization staff, the members of the program committees and reviewers. They have worked very hard in reviewing papers and making valuable suggestions for the authors to improve their work. We also would like to express our gratitude to the external reviewers, for providing extra helps in the review process, and the authors for contributing their research result to the conference. Special thanks go to Atlantis Press.

We wish all attendees of NCRC 2018 an enjoyable scientific gathering in Qingdao, China. We look forward to seeing all of you next year at the conference.

The Editors
Prof. Yunliang Tan
Prof. Shaojie Chen