13.08.2013 Views

Rock Mechanics.pdf - Mining and Blasting

Rock Mechanics.pdf - Mining and Blasting

Rock Mechanics.pdf - Mining and Blasting

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

Figure 10.22 Representation of a<br />

narrow mine opening as a narrow slot.<br />

THIN TABULAR EXCAVATIONS<br />

the presence of natural discontinuities. This is demonstrated in Figure 10.20, where<br />

the stiffness ratios for various jointed specimens are seen to be quite different from that<br />

for an unjointed specimen. As demonstrated in Figure 10.21, various joint patterns<br />

lead to a positive value of a pillar stability index, for a pillar width/height ratio of<br />

0.5. It can be readily inferred, from the shape of the accompanying plots in Figure<br />

10.21, that stable post-peak behaviour is assured at higher pillar width/height ratios.<br />

The results as presented imply that the natural discontinuities in a rock mass have<br />

a dominant effect on the post-peak deformation properties of the medium, <strong>and</strong> may<br />

control the potential for mine global instability. In general, joint sets <strong>and</strong> other features<br />

oriented to favour slip during the process of development of new fractures in a pillar<br />

can be expected to lead to stable yield of the pillar.<br />

Analysis of mine stability for geometrically irregular mine structures is not<br />

amenable to simplification in the way described for the structures developed in stratiform<br />

orebodies. It is possible that a general computational method for global stability<br />

analysis may be formulated by incorporation of the localisation theories of Rudnicki<br />

<strong>and</strong> Rice (1975) <strong>and</strong> Vardoulakis (1979) in some linked computational scheme.<br />

10.8 Thin tabular excavations<br />

Interest in thin, tabular excavations arises since they are common <strong>and</strong> industrially<br />

important sources of ore. They are generated when coal seams or reef ore deposits are<br />

mined by longwall methods. Energy release has been studied extensively in relation<br />

to the mining of South African gold reefs, where, at the mining depths worked,<br />

static stresses are sufficient to cause extensive rock mass fracture around production<br />

excavations. Many of the original ideas associated with energy release evolved from<br />

studies of problems in deep mining in South Africa. For example, Hodgson <strong>and</strong><br />

Joughin (1967) produced data on the relation between ground control problems in<br />

<strong>and</strong> adjacent to working areas in stopes <strong>and</strong> the rate of energy release. Some of these<br />

notions of the mining significance of energy release appear to have developed from<br />

macroscopic application of the principles of Griffith crack theory.<br />

The conventional treatment of a thin tabular excavation such as that by Cook<br />

(1967a), considers it as a parallel-sided slit, as shown in Figure 10.22. Sneddon<br />

(1946) showed that the mining-induced displacements of points on the upper <strong>and</strong><br />

299

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!