Risk lies at the heart of all mining and nowhere more so than in pit slope design. Mining is principally about two areas of risk; safety and economics. This paper addresses the main elements of pit slope design and presents a view of the state of the art in ...

A number of impending and actual pit wall failures have been observed and documented which have been interpreted to initiate on newly generated structural features. This infers failure through intact rock. Failure mechanisms have been postulated resulting ...

The implementation of routine real-time micro-seismic monitoring of open pit mine slopes has been discussed. Some examples of seismic arrays have been given, and a recommendation of suitable seismic sensors made. Unfortunately near-surface sensors are required ...

Potgietersrust Platinums Ltd (PPRust) is Anglo Platinum’s only open pit operation. The major slope stability concern at PPRust is rapid, small-scale brittle failure on the west wall of Sandsloot open pit. In order to improve safety and mine more economically, ...

The feasibility study of Escondida Norte (ENorte), recommended a slope angle design for the Final Pit. But, according to the experience obtained with the slope adjacent to the West wall of ENorte, in which Compañia Minera Zaldívar (CMZ) gained in its phase ...

The analysis of structure using joint set statistics is well known. Other data such as the position of discontinuities and the contacts between rock mass units cannot be easily incorporated in simple statistical analysis based on orientation alone. Algorithms ...

Potgietersrust Platinums Ltd is Anglo Platinum’s only open pit operation and annually extracts 57 million tonnes of rock from 2 open pits. Over the past 3 years ~220 km of exploration drilling has been done, ~1000 km of rock face have been exposed for face ...

In most cases, slope movement monitoring data are collected on a temporal basis and displacement or velocity is plotted against time in order to assist the engineer to make judgements about slope behaviour. Once an unusual behaviour pattern has been established, ...

In this paper, the results of a substantial program of two dimensional and axisymmetric analyses of open pit slopes are described. Variations in the following parameters were taken into account in this programme: slope angle, slope height and horizontal to ...

This thesis deals with teh analysis and stability of large scale rock slopes in open pit mining and specifically the Aitik open pit mine in northern Sweden. A geomechanical model was developed for the Aitik mine, based on extensive field work and review of ...