The Institute and Boliden are continuing their partnership, which began in 2015, in order to study and better understand the response of the rock mass to industrial deep underground mining and develop decision-making support tools to determine the best safety strategies.
The mining sector studied is to the north of Stockholm, at a depth of 1,200m, in one of the deposits of the Garpenberg ore mine.
A multidisciplinary approach has been implemented, including visual observation of the deep underground environment, predictive and comparative 3D digital geomechanical modelling, high-resolution microseismic and geotechnical monitoring, as well as monitoring of extraction data.
The objective is to better understand the rock’s deformation and fracturing conditions and dynamics, on a small and large scale, as well as the role and the effects of aseismic mechanisms, in response to mining. Specific on-site experiments are planned and the analysis of the microseismic data will include the application of template matching* type methods, to the benefit of the e.cenaris monitoring infrastructure.
This project is also accompanied by a doctoral project – a thesis started in March 2020, in collaboration with the GeoRessources laboratory (University of Lorraine) and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, with the support of the Grand-Est region. It follows on from Francesca De Santis' doctoral thesis, defended in February 2019
*Template matching is signal analysis method based on the correlation of time segments with a catalogue of previously created events.
