Rui-Miguel Figueiredo-Lopes-Pereira, "Exploration of a mine waste dump failure", Master Thesis, School of Mineral Resources Engineering, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2018
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.76413
Nowadays the mining exploration is the aim of several studies in order to exploit in a safe, orderly and sustainable way all mine material of economic or no economic value.Focusing on the material with no economic value that represents large volumes ofwaste soil material is going to be deposited in areas properly chosen and close aspossible of the open pits where the waste is produced. These volumes after a fewstages of deposition give rise to enormous masses of soil material named wastedumps. Due to their gradual depositions and different water conditions that can be present, the study of their stability becomes necessary, in order to avoid hazards that can put at risk operations, equipment and above all human lives.In this thesis, analysis of a waste dump stability on a Lignite Mine located in northern Greece was carried out using two different soil models in Plaxis 2D.In the first scenario the kinetic behaviour of all the formations was simulated using the Mohr Coulomb model.In the second scenario, the clayey layer located in the base of deposition wassimulated using Softening Soil Model, while the remaining layers were simulated using the Mohr Coulomb criterion.Comparing the simulation results with the records in the field, the importance of using the appropriate behavioral criterion for each individual layer in order to achieve the optimum result is highlighted.