Design guidelines for the use of SFRS in ground support

摘要

There are presently no design guidelines based on toughness for the use of Steel Fibre Reinforced Shotcrete (SFRS) in ground support for underground mine development. Typically, in the Australian mining environment, the approach to the use of SFRS in ground support has been one of borrowing experiences from other mines and a "trial and error" method of design, installation, and assessment. There is a need, particularly in the mining industry, for a design guide that can be simply applied by "front line" personnel as an aid to their ground support decision making. This paper provides an overview of the performance characteristics of SFRS and how the various shotcrete guides specify its use. Practical experiences of the use of SFRS in Australia and Canada, in various applications and ground conditions, are combined with existing empirically-based ground support design methods in order to develop a ground support guideline that incorporates the concept of toughness. An assessment of Structural synthetic fibres shows that their low modulus makes their performance characteristics different to steel fibres and hence the recommendations made in this paper should not be used to guide their usage.