Slope Monitoring Systems Design for Mining Enterprises

¹ NUST MISIS, College of Mining, 119991, Leninsky ave., Moscow, Russia
² University of Johannesburg, Mining Engineering and Mine Surveying, DFC, Johannesburg, South Africa

Abstract

The fast development of technologies for the collection, processing and interpretation of information, as well as significant complication of mining natural-technical systems, leads to the emergence of a need to revise the principles of monitoring mining facilities. The operation of modern sloping structures in mining enterprises is associated with high industrial and environmental risks, since the possibility of emergencies remains, and the scope of the accident consequences can be continental. The current conditions of mining require the development of new principles to assess and forecast the status of dumps, open pit slopes, tailings dams, and hydraulic dumps. The developed typification of mining and geological phenomena and factors that affect the stability of sloping structures allows the design of monitoring systems of their state with consideration to each object’s specifics. Besides, this approach is formalized and allows its implementation in conditions of digital technologies progress. The development of detailed models of slope structures, which should become their digital twins, at last, enables to evaluate the current state of the observed object at all stages of its life cycle, based on received surveying, engineering-geological and hydrogeological information, and predict the slope structure behavior in the short term and medium term. The main task to be solved is the creation of principles for the organization of monitoring at mining enterprises that will enhance environmental and industrial safety in conditions of significant complication of mining and geological conditions of operated mineral deposits.