Abstract
The majority of the waste generated from opencast mining, termed as overburden (OB), is dumped adjacent to the mine boundary and poses long-term stability issues. Various studies have been carried out to assess the risk of dump slope failure, and treatment strategies have been accordingly recommended to strengthen this OB dump. However, scant works are reported to sustainably utilize this OB for construction works. This study aims to quantify the performance of stabilized noncohesive coal mine OB collected from Gondegaon opencast mine (OCM) in India. Stabilization was achieved using two techniques, namely microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) through Sporosarcina pasteurii (S. pasteurii) and fly ash incorporation. These stabilized samples were evaluated to quantify their shear strength parameters, California bearing ratio (CBR), and modulus of resilience (MR). The results indicate that both these techniques offer enhanced geotechnical properties to the OB samples. However, CBR was observed to increase dramatically from 4.21% to 9.38% in the case of MICP treatment, while incorporation of fly ash enabled a CBR rise of up to 5.01%. This suggests that MICP treatment is a comparatively better alternative to treat cohesionless OB dump soils for possible end-use as a pavement material in mine haul roads.
Recommended Citation
Gautam, Atul and Yadu, Laxmikant
(2026)
"Geotechnical enhancement of noncohesive coal mine overburden using microbially induced calcite precipitation and fly ash stabilization for sustainable pavement applications,"
Journal of Sustainable Mining: Vol. 25
:
Iss.
3
, Article 9.
Available at: https://doi.org/10.46873/2300-3960.1514
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.