Research Article
Coulibaly Yaya ,Li Zhen Che
Abstract
The tailing management is a long term concern for environment and social security. Following the discovery of a new gold mineralization, a mining company aims at reusing one of tailings storage facility at the mining site. However, there is a small treated water reservoir (polishing pond) downstream of the Northwest dam. It is therefore important to know the present state of the Northwest dam’s internal structure. Geophysical methods of electrical resistivity and georadar were used for the auscultation of the Northwest dam. Numerical models were subsequently used to assess the geotechnical behavior of the dam in different deposition situations by simulating the restoration. The image processing results of georadar data show a layered structure near the surface. Changes in electrical resistivity offer deeper information than georadar. The lateral variability of the electrical resistivity corresponds to heterogeneity within each layer. As we cannot collect samples for the characterization of materials, the geophysical interpretation results help to estimate the compositional structure of the dam; ultimately it helps in numerical modeling on the safety factor estimation.