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By H. F. Weaver

The 19th National First-Aid and Mine Rescue Contest was held in the Civic Center, Charleston, w. Va., on October 2, 3, and 4, 1961. The meet was sponsored by the Bureau of Mines and the Joseph A. Holmes Safety Association, in cooperation with State mine inspection agencies, management and labor of the mineral extractive industries, and other groups interested in safety. The Arrangements Committee, as authorized by the General Committee, made the necessary arrangements for conducting the 1961 contest. Members of the Arrangements Committee were: George Trevorrow (chairman), Bituminous Coal Operators' Association; James B. Benson, Southern Coal Producers' Association; Charles Ferguson, United Mine Workers of America; Harry Gandy, Jr., National Coal Association; and James Westfield, Bureau of Mines.

Jan 1, 1962

By Staton L. Tainter

"The Johnny Bull and Silver Knight claims were selected for exploratory diamond drilling after having been examined by the Bureau of Mines 3./The property was considered attractive for two reasons: (1) A prominent outcrop, recognized as an extension of the Tennessee vein, persisted over a distance of 2,000 feet across the claims; (2) its proximity to the known ore shoots in the Tennessee-Schuylkill mine, one of the largest zinc-load producers in Arizona.Actual drilling was started September 18 and was terminated December 8, 1943. Eight holes, aggregating 2,979.5 feet, were drilled with two machines. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSIn its program of exploration of mineral deposits, the Bureau of Mines has as its primary objective the more effective utilization of our mineral resource to the end that they make the greatest possible contribution to national security and economy. I is the policy of the Bureau to publish the facts developed by each exploratory project as soon as practicable after its conclusion. The Mining Branch, Lowell B. Moon, chief, conducts preliminary examinations, performs the actual exploratory work, and prepares the final report. The Metallurgical Branch, R.G. Knickerbocker, chief, analyses samples and performs beneficiation tests."

Jan 1, 1947

By Richard A. Grieve

A 63.5 metric tons per hour (70 TPH) demonstration coal preparation plant was constructed on the Iowa State University campus, Ames, Iowa, as a part of the Iowa Coal Project funded by the state of Iowa and administered through the Energy and Minerals Resources Re-search Institute. Processing equipment in the plant circuit includes a heavy media separator, concentration tables, separating and dewatering screens, and conveying equipment. Coal samples of size 907 metric tons (1000 tons) with sulfur contents ranging from 2.5 to 8.75% sulfur from seven mines in the state of Iowa have been pro-cessed in the plant. Sulfur reductions have averaged 35%. With ash reduction averaging 45%. Equipment for advanced fine coal beneficiation research is currently being installed in the plant to include a slurry pretreatment circuit, froth flotation, oil agglomeration, pelletization, hydrocyclones, advanced design thickener and disc filtration.

Jan 1, 1978

By Edward Barrody

There are wide variations in the values of heats of explosion and detonation as reported in literature. These values are not “stand-alone” or sole properties of the explosives. Specifications of the conditions under which they were determined are necessary to characterize these values. This paper proposes that these values are dependent on their oxygen content and the surroundings their products “work against” upon expansion. Also, the heats of explosion and detonation values can have the same values, but different products, showing that the products can take “independent paths” but have the same values.

Jan 1, 2003

By Pierre Filiatreault, Brian Straight, Stephanie Thibeault, Devin Castendyk, Londie Cameron

"Working on or near water at active, closed or abandoned mine sites is inherently dangerous. Between 1996 and 1999, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) reported 17 fatalities involving drowning at U.S. metal, non metal and coal mines (MSHA, 2000). Openpit mines which fill with water following mine closure, called pit lakes, present numerous risks to environmental monitoring teams including: a) drowning, b) hypothermia, c) falls to the ground from the top of high walls, d) collapse of unstable access roads, e) rock falls and avalanches from pit walls, f) avalanchegenerated tsunamis traveling across the lake surface and g) rapid degassing events.Some pit lakes are simply not safely or easily accessible for ongoing monitoring. However, the routine collection of water samples from the entire water column on a regular basis is needed to monitor the evolution of water quality over time, verify the accuracy of numerical predictions and, ultimately, manage lake water chemistry and ecological risks. For pit lakes with surface water discharge, regular monitoring is used to appropriately design and adjust water treatment plants in order to produce acceptable site discharge water quality.As a product of these risks and the need for water samples, mining companies spend considerable expense on pit lake safety as part of monitoring programs. This includes training personnel for on water duties and hazards, purchasing or hiring specialized equipment and personnel (such as boats, boat operators, personal floatation devices and cold-water clothing called mustang suits), stabilizing pit walls and maintaining safe access roads to the lake surface and employing spotters who can directly communicate with emergency medical services to watch sampling activities because cell phones and radio signals can be blocked by pit walls. Some sites utilize redundancy to prepare for unexpected incidents and accidents. For example, one Canadian mining company requires two boats on the water during pit lake sampling events, with a third boat on the shoreline, gassed and ready to go. In addition, water samplers are required to hold Marine Emergency Duties training to ensure the entire boat crew is sufficient and competent for the safe operation of the vessel in the event of an accident."

Jan 7, 2017

By Zvonimir Ester

The course of motorway tunnel under construction was set only 2 m away from the main motorway. The thickness of the tunnel overburden rock was 9 m. During the tunnel construction the traffic on the motorway was not supposed to be interrupted. The tunneling was carried out by NATM with classical drilling of blastholes and by blasting.

Jan 1, 1998

By R. G. Warncke, Stanley M. Walker

The United States Bureau of Mines was created by an act of Congress in 1910 as a governmental agency to work , on a national scale , toward reducing the huge annual loss of life in the production and processing of the Nation's minerals . From 1906 to 1910 , inclusive , nearly 2,500 miners lost their lives in 84 major explosion disasters , and more than 13,000 suffered fatal injuries from all causes in the coal mines of the United States . Also , conditions in the metal and nonmetal mines were proportionately hazardous during this period , and the total loss of life in all mines and quarries exceeded 3,000 annually and approximately 250,000 workers suffered serious injuries . Under these conditions it is readily understandable why Congress took notice of this " high cost of mining" , and from the investigations and hearings of the day emerged the Bureau of Mines charged with the prevention of accidents and the preservation of the health of all those engaged in the mineral industry; this has continued to be a most important part of the work of the Bureau . Throughout its existence the Bureau of Mines has had no legal authority of enforcement , except during war years , when enforcement necessary to the national security was given to it . The Bureau believes that persuasion , with factual evidence , is the proper and best way to obtain compliance with the safety suggestions made by its engineers and scientists . There is no panacea for accidents , nor will any single " approach " , instill safety consciousness in all workers , and without it accidents will occur --and occur again . To persuade men to work safely, numerous forms of appeal are required to reach the various temperaments of workers in many types of mines operating under diverse conditions .

Nov 1, 1949

"El presente trabajo expone las pautas para la realización de un proyecto de fábrica de cemento, como los factores que influyen en su ubicación respecto al centro de distribución y el tipo de combustible que se emplea para la combustión. El impulso a la creación de una fábrica de cemento, se basa en la existencia de depósitos calcáreos, los cuales estratégicamente ubicados, permiten un mayor progreso económico del país y eliminan la limitación del suministro. Para tal fin, es necesario realizar un estudio económico del consumo considerando el período donde el abastecimiento y costo fueron normales. Otro estudio posible estriba en la comparación de la zona prevista de lde la fábrica con otras áreas de características económicas similares, basándose en la población, movimiento económico y otros elementos de comparación. Una vez determinada la zona, se fija el precio de la venta al público a través de tres elementos: precio de venta en fábrica, costo del transporte y la utilidad del distribuidor. Otros estudios a considerar son los basados en los yacimientos, los cuales complementan mejor la información de la instalación. Entre estos, tenemos a los estudios geológicos, levantamiento topográfico, muestreo sistemático, estudio químico de los minerales y pruebas térmicas y físicas de los productos. La ubicación de la fábrica dependerá si se decide instalar en el sitio de la cantera o en el mismo centro de distribución. Como estudio final, se prevee que la materia prima esté constituída por elementos que químicamente y mineralógicamente sean los más idóneos para así recurrir a materiales de complemento cuya dificultad o facilidad para mezclarlos íntimamente, determine el proceso a utilizarse. En consecuencia, la instalación de dicha manufactura, es el resultado del estudio global de las condiciones provistas en un zona, para así constituirse dentro de un mercado económicamente lucrativo. "

Jul 20, 1957

By H. C. Boydell

Introduction Situated in the district of South Lorrain, some 16 miles southeast of Cobalt, Ontario, and reached from that centre either by branch line of the T. & N. O. railway or by what, for a mining camp, is a reasonably good road, the Keeley mine, owned by the Keeley Silver Mines,' Ltd., has had its history recorded by C. W. Knight (1). Silver was first discovered in South Lorrain, in Woods' vein, on Keeley property, in 1907, and the Keeley mine has been described by Knight (2) and Bell (3). The total production to February 28th, 1930, has been 10,760,107 ounces of silver and 1,285. 434 pounds (weight) of cobalt.

Jan 1, 1931

By J. B. Zadra

After the discovery of the rare-earth mineral deposit in the Clark Mountain area near Mountain Pass, San Bernardino County, Calif., two samples wore obtained through the Mining Division of the Bureau of Mines for investigation of possible method of concentration. Three other samples were received later from different locations in the same area. The rare-earth mineral in this ore had been identified by E. T. Schonk as bastnaesite, a fluocarbonate of the rare-earth metals containing cerium, lanthanum, praseodymium, thorium, uranium, etc. Associated with the bastnaesite were barite, silica, and some calcite. The bastnaesite contained a small amount of iron as a coloration and some manganese. Twenty to fifty percent of the weight of the samples studied was bastnaesite, or ten to twenty-five percent total rare-earth oxides; about half was cerium oxide. Apparently, none of this mineral occurred in pure form. Even the highest-grade particles 'wore contaminated by fine, interlocked grains of barite, calcite, and silica; barite contamination predominated, and the barite was interlocked with varying amounts of bastnaesite. While the specific gravities of pure bastnaesite and barite (approximately 5.0 and 4.50 respectively) differ enough to allow separation by gravity, the interlocking of the minerals nullified this difference. Consequently, only a partial separation could be made by gravity concentration. The extremely fine grained texture of most of the ore prevented grinding to a size that would make concentration by flotation practicable; a partial separation of barite by this means was effected.

Jan 1, 1952

By Brian Gettinger, Jim Schlaman, Alston Noronha

"INTRODUCTION The public understanding of green solutions today is based on the definition of sustainability adopted by the Brundtland Commission (World Commission on Environment and Development) in 1987: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Over time this initial definition evolved to identify three distinct factors impacting sustainability that are often referred to as the “Triple Bottom Line”: Economic, Environmental and Social. The triple bottom line approach seeks to drive outcomes that create maximum value for all stakeholders. In the last ten years purveyors of water and wastewater tunnel solutions have found themselves on the wrong side of a politically polarizing issue in the crosshairs of politicians, environmental activists and community groups branding tunnels as expensive, “gray” and not-sustainable. Tunnels under design were stopped and large planned tunnel programs were delayed or canceled. Therefore being sustainable and “green” is not simply using natural vegetation, but creating an asset that meets current and future needs and will not become a future liability. As this paper will discuss, tunnel projects embody a sustainable triple bottom line project well, are equally sustainable as green infrastructure, and have begun to gain awareness for their sustainability. GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE CHANGES TUNNELING LANDSCAPE The green movement quickly swept across the nation in the mid to late 2000’s and was a hot topic in the media and at all the local, regional and national industry conferences. Politicians espoused the benefit of green infrastructure including job creation, urban renewal, aesthetics, property values economics and sustainability. The political microscope was focused the closest on stormwater and wastewater management, particularly in communities responding to combined sewer overflow (CSO) consent decrees from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As communities with CSO problems evaluated their long term control program (LTCP), local government officials and planners began to balk at the huge price tag required for compliance and began looking for alternatives. “Green” infrastructure was proposed as lower cost solution that could be used to offset capital-intensive “gray” infrastructure like new sewers, storage tanks, tunnels, and treatment facilities. In addition, including green infrastructure in a previously negotiated LTCP required a reset on the entire planning process, additional studies and more planning which would push capital investment further off into the future, subsequently delaying unpopular user rate increases. As a result, tunnel projects as well as trenched conveyance and treatment plant projects that had not yet started construction were stopped, delayed or substantially changed."

Jan 1, 2016

By E. Cho

Illinois No. 6 coals of IBC 101 and IBC 112 were treated in solution with sodium hypochlorite to remove their sulfur contents, especially organic sulfur. The lab experiments were conducted in two steps of leaching at room temperature and hydrolysis at 90oC. The removal of organic sulfur from IBC 101 was by 37.8% while that from IBC 112 was only 13.7% under their respective optimum conditions. This large difference in organic sulfur removal is considered to be due to difference in concentration of surface total acid group, 3.14 vs. 0.88 mmol/g of coal.

Jan 1, 2007

By Jianbo Hu, Gang Han, Tao Zheng, Junfeng Jiang, Rui Su, Qihua Zhao

The rock quality designation (RQD) is a commonly used index for the classification and evaluation of rock mass quality and is widely adopted in mining and geological engineering. The traditional method of obtaining RQD still requires manual measurement of core length and calculation of RQD, which is inefficient. To address this problem, we propose a framework for drilling core image segmentation and RQD estimation from digital images of cores in core boxes based on the deep learning algorithm. The proposed framework is generated by combining the Mask Region-Based Convolutional Neural Networks (Mask R-CNN) instance segmentation algorithm, the U-Shaped Convolutional Neural Networks (U-Net) semantic segmentation algorithm, and the image processing functions of the Open Source Computer Vision Library (OpenCV). To demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method, seven boreholes in the Xiushuihe vanadium-titanium magnetite mine, located in the Sichuan Province, China, were used as the case study. According to the comparison of the manual measurements and calculations of the cores taken from seven boreholes used to conduct this study, the framework can record the length of the drill cores and calculate RQD within an average error rate of 3.42%, while it saves about 85% of the working time. The results illustrate that the proposed framework enhances the efficiency of RQD calculation while satisfying the engineering requirements.

Jul 31, 2023

By Oliver Gago Porras

Son diversas las técnicas que se han empleado para el reforzamiento de la roca durante el proceso de excavaciones subterráneas en la mina Quiruvilca. Sin embargo, los sistemas utilizados actualmente resultan inoperantes, dado que sus elementos de perno y anclaje no se complementan con el terreno señalado. En ese sentido, el presente texto describe el sistema idóneo para el sostenimiento de roca en el que el rendimiento estuvo enmarcado entre los pernos de anclaje y madera. Este método denominado "eslinga para roca", consiste en una combinación de elementos de refuerzo activo y de suspensión, cuya construcción permite aprovechar algunos recursos existentes en la mina.

Nov 24, 1986

By John A. Kost

Previous work performed under Contract H0220003 suggested that the mean incombustible content could be obtained with fewer samples and smaller samples without greatly increasing the sampling error. Under Modification No. 4 additional surveys were made in twelve coal mines, representing six states. Same 2,500 samples were collected, analyzed for incombustible content, and statistically evaluated. The earlier findings were substantiated.

Jan 1, 1975

By Donald Koch

The project investigated regional impacts of mining on the ground water system of the Powder River Basin by: 1) establishment of a regional ground water monitoring network. and 2)development at a set pit digital computer models to simulate ground water flow and quality, ground water contributions to surface water flow and quality (i.e., baseflow), and watershed run-off and recharge. Over 100 wells were monitored for physical and chemical parameters. Data were used as input to the models and for the development of a comprehensive data base. The basin was modeled on a regional and subregional scale using a finite -difference model employing an alternating difference technique. Two water-shed models were evaluated fur their ability to provide runoff and recharge inputs to the basic ground water model. Application of the regional and subregional models using conservative mining scenarios showed that drawdowns may extend west from the mines as far as ten miles but that impacts would be insignificant on a regional scale. The watershed model could be effectively applied to small watersheds only.

Jan 1, 1982

By F. E. Walker

The Bureau of Mines determined total sulfur and sulfur forms for coal in 283 counties in 29 States and 2 fields of the State of Alaska. Specifically, organic, pyritic, and sulfate sulfur were measured of approximately 2,900 samples, and they include most of the coalbeds in the United States.

Jan 1, 1966

By F. E. Walker

The Bureau of Mines determined total sulfur and sulfur forms for coal in 283 counties in 29 States and 2 fields of the State of Alaska. Specifically, organic, pyritic, and sulfate sulfur were measured of approximately 2,900 samples, and they include most of the coalbeds in the United States.

Jan 1, 1966

By B. Swarbrick

Today’s mining occurs in a dynamic world of conflicting objectives. Mining companies have to look further than a traditional cash flow analysis to determine the potential value of developing a mine. In particular, proposals for new mine developments undergo rigorous scrutiny by a variety of stakeholders including regulators, NGO’s, and the local communities. From a business risk perspective, how mining companies address stakeholder concerns can have a dramatic impact on the success of the project. In today’s mining environment mining companies must continue to ‘walk the talk’ to stay in business, particularly during downturns in the business cycle. Falconbridge’s Raglan Mine is an example of a project that was successfully developed in a region that is sensitive from many perspectives, including environmental, socio economic, and regulatory. Close working relationships with local stakeholders along with strong environmental management systems are necessary elements of continued success for the project.

Jan 1, 2000

By Hyu-Soung Shin

This study is concerned with the characteristics of the behavior of steel-concrete composite drilled shafts, a material that is used for large bridge foundations, and especially for weak submerged ground conditions. Depending on the loading or boundary conditions considered, the behavior of foundation will vary. The bearing capacity of steel-concrete composite drilled shaft is influenced by initiation and propagation of fractures along the interface between steel casing and filled concrete. The interface effect is taken into account with the following two simplified cases: (1) detached model with free interface (no shear stiffness of interface) between concrete core and steel casing, (2) confined model by an upper steel cap with free interface. In the confined model, it is intended to have an unified behavior of composite shaft between concrete core and steel casing but there is interface between them. Intensive numerical studies have been undertaken to investigate detailed behavior of the composite shaft. In this study, 3-D finite element analysis is employed. Ground conditions typical of those encountered for the design of drilled shaft under water are considered affecting the behavior. Also, an attempt is made to generate possible combinations of the loads which have been considered in fields. Detailed characteristics of the stress and displacement distributions are evaluated to understand the mechanisms of composite shafts.

Jan 1, 2007