Selection of ground support for mining drives based on the Q-System

As part of the Ground Support Systems Optimisation (GGSO) project undertaken by the Australian Centre for Geomechanics and collaborators, a comprehensive review of the current ground support design approaches implemented at mine sites throughout Australia and Canada was conducted. The review has shown that most mines rely primarily on the Grimstad and Barton (1993) chart to select their initial ground support patterns and standard ground support practices.
There are a number of issues and limitations relating to the application to mining problems of this empirical technique, originally developed for civil engineering. These limitations are to a large degree attributable to the absence of mining case studies in the database and changes in ground support practices since the development of the original guidelines. As part of the GSSO research project a significant database of ground support practices used at mine sites has recently been developed. New empirical guidelines, mainly based on mining data collected from Australia and Canada, are proposed to be used at the feasibility stage, as a first pass design and for subsequent optimisation.