https://doi.org/10.1051/epjconf/202124911013
Discrete modeling of waste rock dumps stability under seismic loading
1
ICUBE, UMR 7357, CNRS, INSA de Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
2
Grupo de Geotécnia, Escuela de Ingeniería en Construcctión, Pontifícia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Valparaíso, Chile.
* e-mail: juan-carlos.quezada@insa-strasbourg.fr
Published online: 7 June 2021
Copper mining produces significant amounts of associate waste, leading to the construction of huge mining waste dumps in the highly seismic zone of the Andes Mountains. To analyze the seismic stability of these deposits, it is necessary to characterize the mechanical properties of these materials in laboratory, which is quite difficult due to the large size of particles composing these structures. In this study, the global stability of mine waste dumps is analyzed by means of discrete element simulations. Three analogues upscaled particle size distributions were generated from the original PSD. The particles composing the dump were modeled using regular polygons. The modeled dumps were subject to a seismic loading by applying a velocity signal on the boundary walls, which was integrated directly from accelerometers database. The results show that failure in these structures is produced by infinite slope, for samples scaled by a factor until ten. This methodology is encouraging for the analysis of the global stability of mine waste dumps and for forecasting the runout distance after failure.
A video is available at https://doi.org/10.48448/cnv2-vn17
© The Authors, published by EDP Sciences, 2021
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
