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Fiber Optic Distributed Sensing System for Monitoring of Tailings Storage Facilities

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

A fiber optic distributed sensing system concentrates on the monitoring of parameters useful to determine the short- and long-term behaviour of the structure in response to external actions, including, for example, seismic activities, as well as long-term phenomena such as seepage, tunneling, sinkholes, and other geostructural movements. Monitoring of large retaining structures with such a system provides direct strain/deformation and temperature measurements on the broad interior area, enabling early detection, localization, and sizing of subsurface damages. Measurements are provided every meter along the entire sensing cable; this is particularly important in cases where the location of defects cannot be predicted, and localized geotechnical instrumentation is therefore useless. Fiber optic distributed sensing cables are relatively easy to deploy, and are generally available for retrofit installation inside the dam structure using trenches on the downstream face, or are laid during construction below the geomembrane liner within the bedding sand layer. Mapping the cable route enables exact correlation between a linear coordinate on the cable length and a position in the dam. Cable installation is envisaged to be carried out during further raising of the embankment; additional cable sections are plugged to the previously installed cables and measured with the existing measurement system, requiring only an update of the mapping. The measurement system is placed remotely from the sensing area, since a section of the sensing cable can be used to link to the sensing area at the storage facility several kilometers away without any performance degradation. The system is available for on-line, 24/7 real-time operational data management. Such fiber optic distributed sensing systems allow the storage facilities to be monitored with long, accurate, continuous and precise data for geotechnical diagnostic purposes.

Text

2023-12-08

Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/86798

Unreviewed

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