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Abstract

The design of deep deposits requires the numerical modeling of large-strain consolidation to represent the release of water with time. Such numerical modeling in the state of practice has traditionally involved the practice of running a single 1-D large-strain consolidation numerical model at the center of the deposit and inferring long-term performance from such numerical modeling. The difficulties with such a methodology are that the 3-D effects of depositing in a tailings facility are not fully considered. Full 3-D numerical modeling of the large-strain consolidation process has been performed however it remains technically challenging to model the deposition process in a 3-D model. Therefore the present paper presents using the pseudo 3-D methodology and coupling it with a depositional model in order to obtain an accounting for the 3-D effects of such a numerical analysis. The deposition process is represented through a 3-D methodology to determine the true surface of the tailings. The consolidation process is modeled through a discretization of the consolidation models into a series of 1-D numerical models such as to represent the final surface as a 3-D representation of the consolidation models vs. time as well as the tailings volumes as a function of time. The methodology is outlined in the paper and its utilization in a typical case study is examined.