Location
New York, New York
Date
15 Apr 2004, 1:00pm - 2:45pm
Abstract
The tailings of potash mining are piled up in huge heaps with heights of up to more than 200 m and a ground area of often more than a square km. The material behaviour of the salt is strongly visco-plastic, so that the slopes of the heaps are moving constantly at slow rates. As the strength of the salt is rate-dependent, structural analysis of the slope stability has to consider the deformations and deformation rates and the interaction of subsoil and slope. Due to the complex material behaviour the structural analysis is accompanied by an extensive measuring programme within the Observational Method. The paper focuses on two slopes of tailing heaps, where huge deformations partly at accelerating deformation rates occurred, due to natural respectively man-made slip-surfaces in the subsoil. The deformation rates were critically high and deformations induced serviceability problems to infrastructure at the base of the slope. It is shown, how the restoration of the endangered slopes and infrastructure was established. The concept of restoration is based on both intensive measuring and numerical simulations.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
5th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
University of Missouri--Rolla
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2004 University of Missouri--Rolla, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Katzenbach, Rolf; Giere, Johannes; and Seip, Matthias, "Stability and Serviceability of Tailing Heaps With Visco-Plastic Materials" (2004). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 14.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/5icchge/session02/14
Stability and Serviceability of Tailing Heaps With Visco-Plastic Materials
New York, New York
The tailings of potash mining are piled up in huge heaps with heights of up to more than 200 m and a ground area of often more than a square km. The material behaviour of the salt is strongly visco-plastic, so that the slopes of the heaps are moving constantly at slow rates. As the strength of the salt is rate-dependent, structural analysis of the slope stability has to consider the deformations and deformation rates and the interaction of subsoil and slope. Due to the complex material behaviour the structural analysis is accompanied by an extensive measuring programme within the Observational Method. The paper focuses on two slopes of tailing heaps, where huge deformations partly at accelerating deformation rates occurred, due to natural respectively man-made slip-surfaces in the subsoil. The deformation rates were critically high and deformations induced serviceability problems to infrastructure at the base of the slope. It is shown, how the restoration of the endangered slopes and infrastructure was established. The concept of restoration is based on both intensive measuring and numerical simulations.
