Prof Malan delivered his Inaugural Address on 29 June 2021 at the University of Pretoria in the Department of Mining Engineering.
Topic: Rock Engineering research as a prerequisite for sustainability and growth in the mining sector.
Contents: Economic growth and technological advances result in a rising demand for metals. As a consequence, surface resources are being depleted, and the depth of mining is gradually increasing. At great depths, flat dipping tabular excavations present unique rock engineering challenges. This is typically encountered in many South African mines. There is limited knowledge on the rock mass behaviour at these depths, which affects the sustainability of the mining sector. Even shallow tabular mines are prone to instabilities. The requirement is to design and develop stable excavations in an anisotropic, inhomogeneous and extensively fractured rock mass. This lecture discusses recent advances in the rock engineering field to address these challenges. Methods to simulate the fracture zone in pillars and stope faces were developed. These techniques enable engineers to simulate the effect of pillar scaling, different mining rates and mining increment lengths. The models also accommodate energy dissipation computations, and the released energy can be used as a measure of seismic activity. This addresses a number of the weaknesses in the traditional usage of energy release rate as a criterion for layout design. Of further interest is the design of rockburst support. New methods to improve the areal characteristics of the support systems are discussed in the lecture. Prof Malan is currently working on developing commodity-specific pillar design formulae to increase the profitability of these mining operations.
(5.7MB PDF)