Evaluating the shear strength of mine waste rock containing particles of metric scale is challenging because commercial laboratory testing devices can only accommodate samples composed of particles a few centimetres in size.
The shear strength empirical model of Barton & Kjærnsli (1981) is therefore frequently used to assess the non-linear shear strength of very coarse granular material for stability assessment of very high mine waste dumps.
In this article, we discuss practical methods for collecting the information required as input to the model, and we also illustrate the implementation of deterministic and probabilistic approaches for estimating the shear strength of several waste materials from a banded iron formation located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.
