Abstract

By confronting interdisciplinary barriers that separate mineral processing, geotechnics and computational sciences, a critical aspect of mine tailings management is addressed, pointing to a surprisingly high-impact outcome for sustainable mining. Tailings are indeed a vital component of a mine’s overall mass balance, evolving over different phases of the mine life. This impacts the coupling of the strategic mine plan with the design of the plant and the tailings facilities. An underdeveloped extension of mine-to-mill integration extends beyond dewatering of the outflow tailings stream, transitioning from aqueous to semi-aqueous processing operations, and then further transitioning to semi-solid and earthmoving operations. While conventional mine-to-mill integration optimizes the coordination of (1) fragmentation dominated by drilling-and-blasting mining engineers and (2) comminution dominated by front-end mineral processors, there is a further unresolved connection to (3) dewatering dominated by back-end mineral processors and (4) geotechnically oriented mining engineers that handle the earthmoving operations that constitute tailings emplacement.

Previous work by Navarra et al. (2019), Wilson et al. (2021) and Órdenes et al. (2025) recognized that a mining system could be represented as a dynamic mass balance fed by geostatistically variable feeds, thus motivating a flexible quantitative framework of Discrete Rate Simulation (DRS) coupled with geostatistical simulation, which supports increasing levels of detail by incorporating submodels within the DRS; the submodels bring increasing detail to critical aspects of a mining system, defining the risks and opportunities that are affecting the multi-stage development of engineering options. Some consideration has been devoted to the settling dynamics within tailings management, including numerical simulations; in the case of filtered tailings, the DRS-based methodology can incorporate performance curves of filter presses. Beyond dewatering, a more dominating concern affecting the tailings that is not adequately addressed, is the dynamics of heavy equipment operators involved in the earthmoving; the operator logistics can be described as “another layer of kinetics.”  Physics-based numerical simulations of the soil behaviour in the earthmoving is analogous to the settling in dewatering, but with the additional layer of equipment operator logistics. The result is that the soil simulations can be incorporated into Virtual Reality (VR) training scenarios for bulldozers and other equipment, generating results that parametrize the system-wide DRS.  The current paper presents the Absolute Nodal Coordinate Formulation (ANCF) which is a finite element representation suitable for soil behaviour in the context of earthmoving, indicative of tailings.

From a strategic perspective, mine developers can anticipate the tonnages of tailings in different phases of a mine life, and even the various classes of tailings, with years of anticipation. This justifies the purchase of fleets of equipment, at a cost of many millions of dollars, but with the risk of a human resource shortage; the lack of skilled tailings operators is a risk. Thus, the ability to reliably upgrade earthmoving operators (i.e. from civil construction) through the use of VR equipment that incorporates the complex soil behavour of tailings, is justified. Moreover, VR training standardizes operating modes in the earthmoving context, enabling broader integration in the mine-to-mill context.