Wadzanai is a hydrogeologist with more than five years of experience specializing in hydrogeology, numerical modeling and environmental geosciences.
Ms. Duthe has more than 25 years of experience in conducting hydrogeologic investigations, including mine dewatering, water supply, contamination and remediation, integrated mine water management, Due Diligence, NI43101, and JORC reporting at all study levels from scoping to design for mining projects throughout Africa.
Typical sedimentary sequences overlying coal seams consist of interbedded sandstones, siltstones, shales, and rider coal seams. In many surface coal mine settings, these sediments are saturated; and prior dewatering of them is necessary for effective and economic mining, including the stacking of saturated spoils. Such sedimentary sections usually have a very low vertical hydraulic conductivity that does not allow them to drain in a timely manner prior to their being stripped. One potential solution is installation of drainwells. Drainwells are small diameter wells that can collect water laterally from the various more permeable layers in the overburden and then gravity drain it to a lower layer – often the coal seam being mined – where it can be removed by pumping wells or sumps located in the bottom of the pit. A ground-water flow model utilizing the 3-dimensional finite element code MINEDW has been used to evaluate the effectiveness of using drainwells in a hydrogeologic setting that is typical of the Powder River Basin. A series of numerical simulations were completed using various combinations and spacings of drainwells and pumping wells to dewater the overburden and coal seams. The numerical simulations suggest that drainwells can be a very effective method of overburden dewatering.
Howell, R.L., L.C. Atkinson, and H. Liu. 2000. Numerical evaluation of effectiveness of drainwells in dewatering overburden at surface coal mines. Society for Mining, Metallurgy, and Exploration Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah, 28 February-1 March.
Houmao Liu
Dewatering a Coal Mine.pdf
This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.
This policy applies to the site www.itasca-africa.com (hereinafter the "Site").
A cookie is a small text file in alphanumeric format deposited on the hard disk of the user by the server of the Site visited or by a third party server (advertising network, web analytics service, etc.). When you log on to our Site, we may install various cookies on your device. The cookies we issue are:
In accordance with the regulations, cookies are kept for 13 months.
By browsing our site, you can click on the "social networks" buttons to consult our LinkedIn profile and our YouTube page. By clicking on the icon corresponding to the social network, the latter is likely to identify you. If you are connected to the social network during your navigation on our Site, the sharing buttons allow you to link the contents consulted to your user account. Google, through Google Analytics, places cookies and tracks the site's audience. We can not control the process used by third-party applications to collect information about your browsing on our Site. We invite you to consult their policy of protection of personal data to know their purpose of use and the navigation information they can collect.
When you visit our Site for the first time, a cookies banner will appear indicating the purposes of the cookies. Please note that further navigation on the Site is equivalent to giving your consent to the use of cookies by ITASCA AFRICA. You can choose at any time to adapt the management of cookies according to your preferences, disable them or express a different choice via the means described below. If you refuse the use of cookies, you may no longer have access to a number of features necessary to navigate certain areas of our Site.
For the management of cookies and your choices, each browser offers a different configuration.
For Chrome:
For Internet Explorer 8:
For Internet Explorer 10 and 11:
For FireFox:
For Safari:
For Opera:
According to the GDPR, you have the right to access, rectify, oppose, delete and limit information from cookies and other tracers. You also have the right to withdraw your consent. For this, please contact [email protected].