Multi-stage Thermal Creep Characteristics of Frozen Tailings

The deformation of tailings dams due to creep has been identified as a significant threat to their stability and overall life-cycle performance. In northern regions, tailings dams constructed mostly on traditionally frozen foundations, are subject to hazards resulting from permafrost degradation due to climate non-stationarity. Due to the rapid rate of global warming in these regions, such time-dependent irrecoverable deformations can be significantly accelerated. Such failures were remarkably monitored in upstream-raised tailings storage facilities where tailings material are subject to incremental mechanical loading. Hence, deep understanding of tailings behavior under constant and rate-dependent thermal and mechanical loads is urgently needed. A parametric study is performed in the present work to capture the first-order multi-stage thermal creep characteristics of frozen geomaterials (mine tailings and foundation) under uniaxial loading. For this purpose, a Critical State Soil Mechanics (CSSM)-based Thermo-Elasto-Viscoplastic (TEVP) constitutive model is developed and employed to investigate such time- and temperature-dependent behaviors.