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Modelling of Static Liquefaction of Cadia Failure with Material Point Method

Tailings and Mine Waste Conference (2023 : Vancouver, B.C.); University of British Columbia. Norman B. Keevil Institute of Mining Engineering

Currently, the mining industry performs stress-strain analyses based on continuum models to represent the fundamental mechanics of the problem using classical numerical platforms based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) and Finite Difference Method (FDM). However, these numerical methods satisfactorily model only the onset of the failure at limited strains and displacement levels. On the other hand, more advanced numerical methods, such as the Material Point Method (MPM), are suitable to simulate the failure initiation, the runout processes, and the final deposition of the filled mass. Motivated by recent tailings dam failures worldwide and advances in numerical analysis techniques, this paper seeks to assess and understand the runout characteristics of dam failures caused by the static liquefaction process. We aim to study failure initiation, flow behaviour during the runout process, and deposition patterns of the dam failure. In this work, we model the Cadia dam failure using the Material Point Method (MPM) to understand problems characterized by large displacements and deformations. The geotechnical parameters of the materials used in the numerical model were obtained from the Report on NTSF (Northern Tailing Storage Facility) Embankment Failure of the Cadia (Morgenstern et al., 2019). Additionally, we reviewed the results of the limit equilibrium analyses prepared for the NTSF (Morgenstern et al., 2019) to determine the failure mechanics imposed into the MPM model. This study used an elastoplastic constitutive model with exponential softening to represent the behaviour of the materials. The numerical simulations were performed using the MPM-PUCRio software (Fernández, 2021), an in-house developed C++ code, where the motion equations are solved under an explicit integration scheme.

Text

2023-12-08

Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86801

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/