MONITORING AND PREDICTING SLOPE INSTABILITY: A REVIEW OF CURRENT PRACTICES FROM A MINING PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Mines have an inherent risk of geotechnical failure in both rock excavations and tailings storage facilities. Geotechnical failure occurs when there is a combination of exceptionally large forces acting on a structure and/or low material strength resulting in the structure not withstanding a designed service load. The excavation of rocks can initiate rock mass movements. If the movement is monitored promptly, accidents, loss of ore reserves and equipment, loss of lives, and closure of the mine can be prevented. Mining companies routinely use deformation monitoring to manage the geotechnical risk associated with the mining process. The aim of this paper is to review the geotechnical risk management process. In order to perform a proper analysis of slope instability, understanding the importance as well as the limitations of any monitoring system is crucial. The geotechnical instability analysis starts with the core understanding of the types of failure, including plane failure, wedge failure, toppling failure, and rotational failure. Potential hazards can be identified by visually inspecting active areas as required, using simple measurement devices installed throughout the mine, and/or remotely by scanning excavations with state-of-the-art instrumentation. Monitoring systems such as the survey network, tension crack mapping and wireline extensometers have been used extensively, however, in recent years, technologies like ground-based real aperture radar, synthetic aperture radar, and satellite-based synthetic aperture radar are becoming commonplace. All these monitoring systems provide a measurable output ready for advanced data analysis. Different methods of analysis reviewed in this paper include inverse velocity method and fuzzy neural network.