Abstract
This article proposes a new application of topology optimization to improve the environmental sustainability of mine waste disposal. Typically, mine wastes can be backfilled in the open-pit where the ore was extracted, sometimes surrounded by a pervious surround. This layer of high conductivity creates preferential path for the groundwater and thus permits to reduce advective contaminant transport to the environment. However, conception of the pervious surround suffers from a lack of general guidelines, and only constant width structure was considered in the literature. Improper design could also results in a reduction of the available space for the wastes, increased costs, or even poor performance. In this study, a topology optimization approach was proposed to assess the optimal pervious surround geometry which minimizes advective solute transport between contaminated wastes and the environment. Five case studies were also considered with several pit shapes including conic, elliptic, and one more realistic geometry for various gradient orientations. Results showed that a constant width pervious surround was close to optimality for pits where their major axis formed an angle of less than a \(45^\circ\) with the regional flow direction. However, for an angle of \(90^\circ\), the optimization indicated that the addition of several linear inclusions of high conductivity within the wastes could help reduce advective solute transport by nearly 40%. This paper presents the formulation of the optimization problem and its numerical implementation, details its application for five different pit geometries, and finally discuss the optimal geometries, the performance of the approach and its limitations.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the Fond de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologie (FRQNT, Grant Number 2017-MI-202116) and from the partners of the Research Institute on Mines and the Environment (RIME UQAT- Polytechnique; http://rime-irme.ca/en). 3D visualization was carried out using the Paraview software (Ayachit 2015) and 2D plots were constructed using the Matplotlib Python library (Hunter 2007). Figures were modified using the free software Inkscape www.inkscape.org.
Funding
This work was supported by the Fond de Recherche du Québec - Nature et Technologie (FRQNT, Grant Number 2017-MI-202116) and from the industrial partners of the Research Institute on Mines and the Environment (RIME UQAT- Polytechnique; http://rime-irme.ca/en).
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Replication of results
HydrOpTop library along with two pervious surround optimization examples is available at the following repository: https://github.com/MoiseRousseau/HydrOpTop. The modified finite volume solver used to carried the numerical simulations is available at: https://bitbucket.org/pflotran/pflotran/branch/moise/make_optimization_v2. Numerical models of the case studies are, however, not published because of storage constraint.
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Rousseau, M., Pabst, T. Topology optimization of in-pit codisposal of waste rocks and tailings to reduce advective contaminant transport to the environment. Struct Multidisc Optim 65, 168 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-022-03266-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00158-022-03266-1