Due to their size and often their remoteness, large geotechnical structures such as railings dams are ideally suited to be observed using smart monitoring technologies. With the arrival of the 4th Industrial Revolution and in a year characterised by unprecedented disruption and uncertainty impacting physical access for monitoring purposes the adoption of state-of-the-art Internet of Things (IoT) solutions for remote monitoring applications provides a unique, real-time view into the behaviour of these structures.
To improve understanding of the long-term pore pressure behaviour associated with the operation of a tailings dam, the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Pretoria (UP), in collaboration with SRK Consulting and Marula Platinum, is conducting an instrumentation project to observe pore pressure (both positive and negative), moisture content and temperature at nine monitoring locations on a platinum tailings dam. The Marula Platinum Mine is situated approximately 30 km northwest of the town of Burgersfort. The mine operates a tailings dam with a footprint of48 Ha on which deposition occurs through spigotting.
Pore pressure and tensiometers
It is of interest to understand the evolution of the pore pressure regime in the tailings dam associated with normal operation in terms of an unsaturated soil mechanics framework. The primary variables affecting the pore pressure regime are the tailings moisture content and the pore water suction. These are being measured using volumetric water content probes and tensionmeters respectively. The UP Department of Civil Engineering has developed high-capacity tensionmeters (Figure 1) capable of measuring both positive pore pressures and negative pore pressure in excess of 1 MPa (Jacobsz 2019).
