ABSTRACT

The depletion of easily minable ore deposits is forcing our country to mine ore deposits located in geological disturbed areas. These geological disturbed areas comprise of folds, faults, dykes foliation planes etc.

The opencast mining in such area poses numerous problems. One of the important problem is stability of slope of opencast mine situated in faulted rock mass.

This paper described the procedure of constructing Equivalent Material Model (E.M.M.) and method for carrying out slope stability investigation of opencast mine. A new E.M.M frame was designed and fabricated for these simulation of fault in E.M.M. For the present study, three E.M.M. were investigated. The model one and two were simulation of faulted rock mass and third model was simulated for unfaulted rock mass.

The slope forming benches of opencast mine were found to be unstable for inclined faulted model.