Underground Mining

Shafts, pillars, stopes and caves. Mining below the surface: accessing the orebody with shafts, declines and adits; room-and-pillar and longwall methods for flat seams; stoping methods for metal mines; and mass caving for giant low-grade orebodies — with pillar design, hoisting and production calculations.

• Shafts, Declines & Development — Before ore can be mined, it must be reached. Learn access options — vertical shafts, inclined shafts, declines (ramps) and adits — hoisting systems and capacity, decline design, the development cycle (drill, charge, blast, muck, support), and development rates.
• Room & Pillar Mining — Room-and-pillar mining leaves a grid of pillars to hold up the roof of flat-lying deposits (coal, potash, salt, limestone). Learn tributary-area pillar stress, pillar strength formulas (Salamon–Munro), factor of safety, extraction ratio trade-offs, and retreat (pillar robbing).
• Longwall Mining — Longwall mining is the most productive underground coal method. Learn panel layout (gate roads, face, goaf), the shearer, armoured face conveyor and hydraulic shields, face production calculations, shield support capacity, subsidence, and automation.
• Stoping Methods — Metal mines extract ore from openings called stopes. Learn open stoping (sublevel open stoping, longhole, VRM), filled stoping (cut-and-fill, paste fill), shrinkage stoping, their selection criteria, dilution and ore loss, stope stability (Mathews stability graph) and backfill.
• Block & Sublevel Caving — Caving methods let gravity break the ore: once undercut, the orebody collapses progressively and is drawn from drawpoints. Learn block caving and panel caving, sublevel caving, caveability (Laubscher MRMR and hydraulic radius), draw control, production rates, subsidence and risks such as mud rushes and air blasts.