Numerical Modelling Challenges in Rock Engineering with Special Consideration of Open Pit to Underground Mine Interaction

Numerical modelling of the groundwater inflow to an advancing open pit mine: Kolahdarvazeh pit, Central Iran.

The groundwater inflow into a mine during its life and after ceasing operations is one of the most important concerns of the mining industry. This paper presents a hydrogeological assessment of the Irankuh Zn-Pb mine at 20 km south of Esfahan and 1 km northeast of Abnil in west-Central Iran. During mine excavation, the upper impervious bed of a confined aquifer was broken and water at high-pres...

Investigation of Bishop’s and Janbu’s Models Capabilities on Slope Stability Problems with Special Consideration to Open-Pit Mining Operations

One of the most effective parameters in economics of open-pit mines is the pit slope angle, so that the slope angle more than the optimum value increases the probability of a large failure in the pit wall and the slope angle less than the optimum value leads to increasing stripping ratio and reducing net present value of mine. Therefore, in this paper, considering the limit equilibrium methods ...

An Uncertainty-based Transition from Open Pit to Underground Mining

There are some large scale orebodies that extend from surface to the extreme depths of the ground. Such orebodies should be extracted by a combination of surface and underground mining methods. Economically, it is highly important to know the limit of upper and lower mining activities. This concern leads the mine designers to the transition problem, which is one of the most complicated problems...

Application of artificial neural network and genetic algorithm to modelling the groundwater inflow to an advancing open pit mine

In this study, a hybrid intelligent model has been designed to predict groundwater inflow to a mine pit during its advance. Novel hybrid method coupling artificial neural network (ANN) with genetic algorithm (GA) called ANN-GA, was utilised. Ratios of pit depth to aquifer thickness, pit bottom radius to its top radius, inverse of pit advance time and the hydraulic head (HH) in the observation w...

Module 12: Numerical Modelling in Rock Engineering