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Development of Specimen Curing Procedures that Account for the Influence of Effective Stress During Curing on the Strength of Cemented Mine Backfill

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Abstract

Paste backfill used to provide ground support in underground mining is generated from full-stream tailings and is almost always placed underground with cement. For the backfill, both the rate of strength development and the final strength are important considerations for design, particularly when the backfill is subsequently exposed in the stope-mining sequence. There is strong evidence that strengths measured on specimens obtained from coring the in situ cemented backfill are much greater than laboratory-cured specimens with the same cement content. The paper reviews some of the experimental evidence showing that one of the major reasons for the different strength is the difference in effective stress acting on the backfill during curing. Laboratory specimens are (almost) always cured under zero total stress, so no effective stress develops. In contrast, backfill in a stope may cure under high effective stress, which develops due to either “conventional” consolidation in free-draining backfills, or to the so-called “self-desiccation” mechanism in fine-grained fills. Evidence is presented showing how the final strength is affected by applying stress to specimens at different stages of curing and at different rates. It is shown that a fully-coupled analysis of the filling behaviour is required to determine the appropriate effective stress regime to apply in curing laboratory specimens, where “fully-coupled” in this context means taking account of the interaction of consolidation/drainage rate, filling rate and cement hydration rate. Curing protocols for laboratory specimens are proposed, which would ensure that the strengths obtained are representative of in situ conditions.

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Abbreviations

C c :

Cement content: weight of dry cement per unit dry weight of solids (tailings and cement)

c v :

Coefficient of consolidation

K o :

Coefficient of earth pressure “at rest” (=σ′ h/σ′ v)

q u :

Unconfined compressive strength

ε a :

Axial strain

σa :

Axial stress in an unconfined compression test

σ b :

Stress on the barricade

σh, σ′h :

Total and effective horizontal stress

σv, σ′v :

Total and effective vertical stress

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the project sponsors Panoramic Resources, Barrick, and BHP Billiton for their support of this research. Financial support for the first author for his PhD work at UWA was provided by the UWA Gledden Postgraduate Scholarships Foundation, the Shaw Memorial Postgraduate Scholarship Foundation, and MERIWA (the Minerals and Energy Research Institute of Western Australia) for their financial contribution to this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil and Resource Engineering (M051), The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Perth, WA, 6009, Australia

    Martin Fahey & Andy Fourie

  2. Centre for Geotechnical and Materials Modelling, The University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia

    Matthew Helinski

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  1. Martin Fahey
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  2. Matthew Helinski
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  3. Andy Fourie
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Correspondence to Martin Fahey.

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Fahey, M., Helinski, M. & Fourie, A. Development of Specimen Curing Procedures that Account for the Influence of Effective Stress During Curing on the Strength of Cemented Mine Backfill. Geotech Geol Eng 29, 709–723 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10706-011-9412-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10706-011-9412-2

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