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Author ORCID Identifier

Isaac Vennes: 0000-0001-7737-7154

Hani Mitri: 0000-0002-6482-7424

Abstract

Large-scale panel destressing is a rockburst mitigation technique employed in deep hard rock mines during remnant pillar extraction. Panels are choke blasted in the pillar footwall to cutoff the far-field major stress in the mining area and deviate them around the pillar. In this study, the effects of panel geometry and far-field stress magnitude are investigated. Destress blast performance is assessed by measuring change to the energy release rate (ERR) of all mining steps during the extraction of a simplified remnant pillar due to destressing. It is demonstrated that the energy release rate (ERR) of critical stopes is reduced by 30% with the base panel geometry. The panel thickness is shown to have the most influence on the efficiency of destressing, followed by the stand-off distance between the panel and the pillar and the overhang length of the panel. The effect of far-field stress magnitude on the ERR is also investigated, and the destress blast performance is expressed as an equivalent major principal stress reduction. It is shown that with the base panel geometry, the destressing program offers the same ERR reduction as a 9.6 MPa reduction in the far-field stress for the most critical stopes. Finally, the Copper Cliff Mine (CCM) panel destressing program is presented as a case study. The ore at risk and ERR are calculated over the extraction and destressing sequence in the pillar with a pillar-wide numerical model.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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