Resume/ Abstract:

CV

Maryam completed her bachelor's degree in Electromechanical Engineering/Industrial Automation and Production in December 2022 from the École Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Sfax (ENIS) in Tunisia. Since Summer 2023 term, she has been pursuing her Master’s degree in Mineral Engineering at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT), Research Institute of Mines and Environment (RIME), where her research focuses on the study of the hydro-mechanical behaviour of cemented paste backfill in underground mines, by combining both physical and numerical modeling approaches.

Résumé

Backfilling constitutes a fundamental technique in underground mining operations, serving as an effective means of providing secondary ground support and mitigating risks to personnel. Cemented paste backfill (CPB) is retained within the mine stope by concrete or waste rock barricades positioned at the draw-point near the stope entrance. The failure of these barricades can have severe consequences, ranging from substantial equipment damage to potentially fatal accidents. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the pressures exerted on these retaining structures is crucial to ensuring their stability and preventing failures. Assessing these pressures, particularly during the critical backfilling phases occurring between 3 and 15 hours after CPB placement, presents a significant challenge for the mining industry. However, direct in situ testing is hindered by the extreme underground environments and operational constraints. To address these limitations, a combined physical and numerical modeling approach has been adopted. A small-scale physical model of a longitudinal mine stope was designed and equipped with total earth pressure cells (TEPCs) and piezometers to monitor the evolution of total overburden (geostatic) pressure and pore water pressure at the CPB-barricade interface, considering different barricade positions within the drift. In this model, the stope consists of a filling chamber with a horizontal cross-section of 20 ´ 20 cm and a height of 160 cm. The stope/filling chamber is connected to a drift (called drawpoint), which has a vertical cross-section of 20 ´ 20 cm and a length of 190 cm. The laboratory experiment simulates underground conditions in a controlled setting, enabling a detailed analysis of the hydromechanical behaviour of different types of CPB mixtures and the resulting loads applied on the barricade. In parallel, numerical simulations were conducted using the SIGMA/W software from the GeoStudio suite developed by GeoSlope International (Seequent) to calibrate the laboratory results, thereby establishing a predictive model capable of extrapolating experimental findings to real-world underground mining conditions. The integration of these two methodological approaches has provided valuable insights into the interactions between the CPB and the barricade, contributing to the refinement of retaining structure designs and the formulation of recommendations aimed at optimizing the safety of underground mining operations.

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Mlle. Maryam Rguii