Real-time monitoring of tailings dams

ABSTRACT

Real-time monitoring can improve the performance assessment of tailings dams by reducing the laborious component of data collection while streamlining the analysis process. When planning and installing instrumentation, the challenge exists where if nothing goes wrong, the question is asked whether too much instrumentation is installed, where on the other hand if a failure occurs, the question is asked as to why more investment was not made to prevent it from occurring. This paper identifies the monitoring system requirements, assesses the cost of historical tailings dam failures (Mt Polley and Fundão), assesses the cost of a real-time monitoring system to suit the instrumentation that was in place at time of failure of those dams (including standpipe and vibrating wire piezometers, digital inclinometers, and flow meters), and suggests ways to extract more value from individual instruments to full monitoring system integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Remote sensing
• real-time monitoring
• tailings dam
• risk
• geotechnical
• mining

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).