On a global scale, the demand for mineral products has increased substantially with economic development. Consequently, the mining of mineral resources results in the production and accumulation of a large number of tailings, causing many problems with respect to mining, the environment, and the economy. In the mining process, tailings must be reasonably treated to prevent them from entering the water cycle through rivers. The storage of tailings under water can effectively hinder the chemical reactions that they undergo. Therefore, it is a critical practice to store these substances in ponds or impoundments behind dams. However, tailings dams frequently fail, resulting in the discharge of significant quantities of tailings into the natural environment, thereby causing grievous casualties and serious economic losses. This paper discusses reasons including seepage, foundation failure, overtopping, and earthquake for tailings dam failures and explores failure mechanisms by referring to the available literature. This research has determined that the failure of tailings dams is closely related to the state of the country’s economy. Most of the tailings dam breakages in developed countries occurred decades ago. In recent years, the proportion of tailings dam failures in developing countries has been relatively high. Considering the serious damages caused by tailings dam breakage, it is important to understand the main reasons and mechanisms for their failure. The purpose of this review is to provide a reference for the design and construction to the building of the tailing dams and to reduce the occurrences of their failure.

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Using single layer microchannels accompanied by nanofluids is one of the most practical solutions in thermal management of high power density devices. The main challenge in cooling systems of electronic devices is to provide a uniform temperature distribution. In the present study, fluid flow and heat transfer in a fractal microchannel heatsink have been simulated employing the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. The fractal microchannel is used to achieve uniform temperature distribution. Thermal performance of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) and multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) dispersed in the two base fluids of water and kerosene in a fractal microchannel at Reynolds (Re) numbers of 1500 to 3000 are investigated. It should be noted that the nanofluids have been simulated by the two-phase mixture model. The results indicated that the use of fractals silicon microchannel leads to having a uniform temperature distribution. Based on the results, at maximum Re number when the working fluid is water, Nu number and pumping power are 20.9 and 0.033 W whereas, in kerosene flow at the same condition, Nu number and pumping power are 6 and 0.054 W, respectively. According to the obtained results, using the SWCNT nanoparticle compared with the MWCNT nanoparticle leads to a significant enhancement in the Nusselt (Nu) number. This difference is more pronounced by increasing the Re number and nanoparticle volume fraction. In addition, the results indicated that at the same Re number and nanoparticle volume fraction, the performance evaluation criterion of the water-based nanofluid is 4 times higher than that of the kerosene-based nanofluid. So the use of the water as the working fluid with the SWCNT nanoparticle for cooling in the fractal silicon microchannel is recommended.

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