Geotechnical Characterization of Old Tailings Facility for a Mining Plan Design

J. Ale(1)(2); J. McCord(2); F. Perez(2); C. Jimenez(3)

(1)
Universidad San Ignacio de Loyola (jose.ale@gmail.com)
(2)
Amec Foster Wheeler, Peru
(3)
Minsur

As result of new metallurgical processing techniques, an old tailings storage facility located in the
southern Andes of Peru has acquired economic importance. For this reason, it is planned to design
a mine plan within the tailings storage facility. The tailings storage facility is located on the glacial
valley, with a tailings thickness of up to 50 m. The tailings dam is composed of coarse tailings (silty
sands), and has been built following the growing method of upstream embankment. Upstream of
the dam, the stored material is mostly composed of fine tailings (low plasticity silt). The
groundwater level is at 10 meters depth, which means that most of tailings are saturated.

The proposed mining method is the excavation by conventional equipment (excavators) and
transport by trucks. Therefore, the tailings material to be excavated must have a water content
that allows the execution of the work. It has proposed a dewatering plan within the tailings
storage facility, to thereby ensure the workability of the tailings material.

This paper presents the geotechnical characterization of the tailings material at different water
content (which ranges from 3% to 25% after dewatering). To perform this characterization, a field
geotechnical investigation and a laboratory program were conducted. The field investigation was
composed of: drillings, SPT, CPT, pumping wells, and Shelby sampling. Laboratory tests program
consisted of: soil-water characteristic curves, grain size by sedimentation, specific gravity, and
triaxial compression tests. The unsaturated behavior (soil-water characteristic curve) was obtained
from two ways: laboratory tests, and correlations from the global grain size of the tailings
material.

Finally, shear strength parameters were obtained for different degrees of saturation of tailings
material (after conducting of dewatering). With these unsaturated geotechnical parameters, the
cut slopes for the mining plan and the bearing capacity of tailings material were calculated.