THE ISSUE

    While huge progress has been made to increase safety in burst prone ground, there is an ongoing need to develop more reliable approaches for dealing with dynamic ground support requirements and formulating appropriate ground support strategies in underground burst prone mines.

    THE SOLUTION

    The development of BurstSupport, a new software tool released in 2013 for use by rock mechanics engineers at mines, improves rock support design strategies in areas of a mine affected by large seismic event, by enabling the selection of appropriate ground support elements when dealing with dynamic loading conditions from fault-slip events in underground mines.

    This powerful, user-friendly, Windows-based 3D tool, provides mining and civil engineers the ability to conduct rock support design in deep underground mine drifts or civil tunnels. Users can visually assess load, displacement and energy demands at multiple drift locations by considering anticipated seismic event magnitude and location, stress, drift orientation and rock mass quality simultaneously. BurstSupport allows safety and geo-risk management through integration of all relevant engineering design components. It is envisioned that rockburst risk management can be significantly improved using this tool.

    THE RESULTS

    This tool greatly improves the utility of the Canadian Rockburst Support Handbook (to be published in an updated guide). The next phase of this project will aim at validating and then integrating BurstSupport with S-GMAT, a synthetic ground motion modeling tool used to estimate ground motions produced in response to fault rupture. The BurstSupport Tool is now available for licensing. For more information contact Ming Cai.

    Contact

    • Ming Cai, MIRARCO, Laurentian University
    • 1-705-675-1151 x 5099
    • mcai@laurentian.ca
    • www.laurentian.ca

    Solution team

    • Damien Duff, CEMI
    • Simson Nickson, Vale
    • Lars Malmgren, LKAB
    • Peter K. Kaiser, CEMI, RTC-UMC
    • Claire McAneney, NSERC