News
In April 2005 a research team consisting of Professors Grabinsky (lead applicant), Cascante (Waterloo), Bawden, Klein and Mohanty were awarded a Research Tools and Instruments (RTI) Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Canada (NSERC), that provided funding for a high-frequency triaxial test apparatus with embedded ultrasonic transducers for simultaneous non-destructive characterization of the sample. This apparatus was design and built by Geotechical Consulting and Testing Systems
(GCTS) of Tempe, Arizona, and is described more fully in the Research area of this site. The system has been installed in our research laboratories and is undergoing verification testing.
In September 2005 one of our research team, Paul Simms, joined the faculty at Carleton University's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Ottawa, Ontario. Paul was an NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellow (PDF) with us from August 2003 until his departure for Carleton, and made a great contribution to the group's foree into the unsaturated behaviour of paste on surface and cemented paste backfill. Paul is continuing his interests in mine wastes with new research programs at Carleton, and also with ongoing research collaborations here at Toronto.
A comprehensive multi-year, multi-company and multi-university study is in the final planning stages. This will provide for extensive field and laboratory testing of cemented paste backfill and will address important design issues such as: How can binder design be improved to minimize cost while achieving peak efficiecy? Is multi-stage filling required, and what is the maximum rate of stope filling that can be safely achieved? What methods should be used to design and construct fill barricades? How long must a fill be allowed to cure before production blasting may resume in proximity to the fill? How can high strength fills be economically achieved for critical applications such as mining through or under wide spans of fill? Stay tuned to learn of recent progress on this research proposal...