No abstract

The open pit mining method of solid minerals extracting is widely used both in Russia and in the whole world, and sets a general direction of mining industry development as its main tool, at least for the next decades. This is due to its significant advantages compared with other methods of minerals extraction, especially with underground method. This conclusion is made considering production capacity of mining and enrichment enterprises, mining safety, productivity and working conditions, investment and operating costs, level of mechanization, automation, robotization, informatization and computerization of production, full use of mineral resources. However, the practical realization of these advantages of the open pit method of mining, neutralization and reduction or elimination of its shortcomings (environmental damage) requires thorough and reliable design solutions, their timely and accurate adjustment, application of scientific methods and modern technical and technological means. This is especially important and relevant for design, construction, operation, reconstruction and reclamation of open pits developing complex and large deposits of scarce and valuable mineral resources. Erroneous and insufficiently substantiated design solutions and their implementation lead to a significant decrease in the efficiency of open pit mining.

Currently, in developing the most inclined and steep coal deposits in the Central and Northern Kuzbass (Western Siberia, Russia), the deeping longitudinal open pit mining method is used with overburden rock moved to external dumps using transport technology. One of the ways to reduce the rate of land withdrawal while reducing development costs by shortening the distance of overburden movement is to use block lateral mining method with overburden storage in the worked out space. The paper emphasizes that well-known technological solutions consider quarry fields untouched by mining, or in the process of exploitation, so the block mining procedure is using fragmentally along with moving overburden by dump trucks. Internal dumping, as an element of land preservation, has not been generally considered to date. This is a deterrent to the implementation of resource-saving mining technologies, both in design and mining practice.

With the deepening of open pit mining, the volume of worked out space increases and, along with it, the potential capacity for storing overburden. At the same time, the pits completely allocated for the internal dumps are used only by the end of the period of the open pit operation. The known theoretical approaches to determining the location of the internal dump are little implemented in the practice of surface mining, which is explained by two reasons. First, standard design solutions are based on wellknown theoretical provisions; secondly, a formalized template approach to substantiating certain design developments in the field of dumping of internal dumps prevails, which pushes them towards their fragmentary rather than integrated implementation. With regard to the conditions of the Kuzbass open-pit mines, the article proposes a modernized interpretation for the formation of structural schemes of the sequence of quarry fields on the basis of constructive-and-parametric studies of a multivariate adaptation of the internal dumping mode.

Today, up to two-thirds of the world’s minerals are mined in an open, more economical way. However, at the same time, billions of tons of overburden are extracted, which are piled in the dumps, where they are polluted, lose their value and, in addition, reduce the quality of the environment. The possibility of industrial use of various rocks of from quarry field characterizes the complexity of minerals extracted by surface mining. Currently, there are no clear criteria for determining the size of blocks when designing enterprises for open pit mining. In most cases, when designing open pit mines, a quarry field is conventionally divided into several blocks, which does not always ensure the optimal production capacity of the mining enterprise due to the uneven distribution of reserves in the block contours. Because of that, during the transition from one block to another, a decrease in the production capacity of the enterprise can be noted. To avoid productivity decreasing, the precise analysis of the block parameters must be performed.