Observations and analysis of incidences of rockburst damage in underground mines

[Truncated abstract] This thesis deals with the topic of rockburst damage in hard rock, mechanised underground mines. Specifically, given a seismic event occurs at or near an excavation boundary, what factors specific to the characteristics of that excavation determine whether or not rockburst damage occurs and the severity of that damage? These findings were used to develop a probabilistic and empirical based system for assessing the rockburst damage potential of an excavation. An extensive literature review was undertaken to identify the current state of understanding of the rockburst problem, as well as determining shortcomings in the understanding of the rockburst damage potential of underground excavations. The review showed that there was no widely adopted or effective method of determining the likelihood and severity of rockburst damage. A large catalogue of rockburst case histories was collected. The catalogue comprised of 254 instances of rockburst damage from 13 hard rock, metalliferous, mechanised underground mines in Australia and Canada. The mines cover a range of commodities, geological conditions, mining methods and ground support practices. Through preliminary assessment of these case histories it was apparent that certain excavation specific factors contributed to the occurrence and severity of rockburst damage and were common across the different mine sites. It was found that for a given magnitude seismic event at a given distance from an excavation (that is, a characteristic peak particle velocity) there is a significant amount of variation in the amount of rockburst damage done which is dependent on site specific factors at the damage site. The literature review identified that there was limited data available on the in situ performance of complete ground support systems when subjected to dynamic loading.