Workshops

The course will cover the technologies and interpretations necessary to produce a typical Directive 85 fluid tailings investigation, and a typical dam safey investigation.  An introduction to a broad suite of testing tools will be provided with an explanation of the derived engineering parameters and limitations of each test.  Some of the covered techniques include:

• Soil Stiffness and 2D Stratigraphy: Multichannel Analysis of Surface Waves (MASW)

• Groundwater and 2D Stratigraphy: Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT)

• The Seismic Piezocone Penetration Test (SCPTu) and modules to investigate:

  • • Thermal Conductivity

    • Tailings Constituents, Hydrocarbons

    • Particle Size and Visual Inspection

    • Electrical Resistivity

• Volumetric Water Content: Magnetic Resonance

• Horizontal Stress and Stiffness Degradation: Pressuremeter

• Undrained Shear Strength, Viscosity: Variable Rate Vane Shear Testing (VST)

This course is targeted to engineers, planners and tailings professionals with an understanding of basic soil mechanics.    

A DBM is a concise document, prepared by the landform design team for every landform design or mine closure plan. It contains background information about the site, a precise listing of all the inputs into the design, the vision for the reclaimed landform or mine site, and a nested list of design and landscape performance goals, objectives, and criteria needed to support the vision. It is used to guide design and to gain broad acceptance for design and assessment of the landform or landscape.

This two-hour short course provides the training you need to write your next landform design DBM. Topics include:

• Introduction to landform design

• Reasons to develop a DBM

• Preparing to write the DBM

• Writing the major DBM sections

  • Documenting the major inputs into the design

  • Forging the vision for the reclaimed landscape

  • Preparing a master table of goals, objectives and criteria

• Adapting the DBM format for your project; hard-won tips for efficient writing and traps to avoid

• Implementing the DBM and keeping it current

• And a worked example of a simple landform design DBM.

The course is presented by Gord McKenna, chair of the Landform Design Institute.

The CSSM provides a means for understanding how soil under a certain pre-shear state will behave when sheared to failure. The trigger for flow failures of many tailings storage facilities with abrupt deformation and long-runouts has been ascribed to flow liquefaction of the tailings materials, including the 1994 Merriespruit failure (Fourie et al., 2001), the 2018 Cadia failure (Jefferies et al., 2019), and the 2019 Brumadinho failure (Robertson et al., 2019). The critical state line (CSL) and state parameters, ψ, are the most important references to access the liquefaction susceptibility of tailings materials. The short course introduces the fundamentals of the CSSM via the interpretation of stress paths and the application in predicting tailings behaviours using critical state parameters and critical state-based constitutive models.

Presenter F. Albert Liu is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering within the School of Mining and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Alberta.