Numerical simulation of a multi-reef tabular mining layout in a South African platinum mine

Abstract

Some of the key problems facing rock engineers on mines in the Bushveld Complex are design of stable panel spans, optimum pillar dimensions and assessing hangingwall stability. A particularly difficult problem is encountered in some mines where multi-reef tabular layouts are exploited with a small middling between the reefs. As exploitation of the lower UG2 reef was never envisioned in the early years of platinum mining, the layout of the upper Merensky reef was never optimised for multi-reef extraction. This makes the design of UG2 layouts very problematic. To assist with these designs, the newly developed TEXAN computer code has been found to be very useful. The paper gives a brief overview of the code and then describes a case study of the stress analysis of a multi-reef tabular mining layout.