Underground Mine Water Management & Mine Roof Support
In addition to the operational issues of dust control, confined spaces electrical dangers and poor visibility that we’ve discussed in the previous topic there are two other dangers that are every present in underground environments. These are risks due to rock fall and due to water in flow. In this topic, we’ll have a look […]
Underground Mine Safety
Underground mines are inherently dangerous environments considering both illness and accidents there are around one million work related deaths around the world every year. The mining industry takes safety very seriously with an aspiration goal of zero fatalities. The safety of workers must always be of primary importance in any mining activity. Hazards in underground […]
Underground Mining
In this module, I’ll take you through the key aspects related to underground mining activities. In this module, we will look at economic considerations in regard to underground mining, geological conditions suited to underground mining, the different operational and technical approaches using underground mining and important operational considerations including roof support, ventilation, safety, water management […]
Safety in Open Pit Mining
Welcome back to the surface mining model. In the previous topic, we learned about different types of surface mining operations, about equipment, about different methods that are commonly used to extract coal or different ore deposits. It’s not difficult to understand that mining is one of the most dangerous working environments in the world and […]
Mining Excavation Methods
In the previous topic, we saw that blasting is the mining operation used to break the rock mass in order to facilitate the removal of the overburden. We saw that some of the main equipment used to remove the overburden are truck lines, trucking shovels, excavators. In this topic, we will look at some of […]
Open Pit Mining Operations
The previous topic has established that surface mining operations include several main activities that include the ore extraction or mine of the material, the overburden excavation and removal, the overburden transport, the waste disposal, the low grade material pile and transport for future treatments or separated process. The ore extraction and the material handling process […]
Open Pit Slope Design & Stability
In the concept of mining a deposit, mining operations should be planned and organized in order to maximize the productivity. Slope stability issues directly affect the productivity. It’s for these reasons that they need to be addressed with theoretical and technical expertise. And the realization of a surface mine, 3 fundamental processes should be taken […]
Surface Open-pit Mining
First of all let’s define what we mean with surface mining. Surface mining means the extraction of mineral deposits or coal reserves or stones of different kinds that are outcropping the earth’s surface or located at shallow depth from it. The economic depth for surface mining can range from 100 metres to 1 kilometre and […]
Types of Rock Failure
Rock mass failure does not always involves discontinuities. There are cases, especially for excavations, like the tunnel you see on this photo where the stress simply exceeds the strength of the rock metrics, and, hence, this later can fail. We have seen, in a previous topic, that creating an opening in a rock mass modifies […]
Rock Joint Failure
In previous topics, we have seen that discontinuities constitutes as a weakness in the rock mass. In fact, failure of a slope, for example, is often triggered by the failure of discontinuities in triggering block instability. These can occur on natural or man-made slopes. This figure illustrates two possible failure scenarios involving failure of discontinuities. […]