Hydraulic performance and stability of coarse rockfill deposits
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Open-pit coal mining operations often generate enormous quantities of waste rock. This is dumped into nearby valleys and the coarsest fraction ends up at the bottom of the deposit; the final result is often referred to as a ‘rock drain’. These ‘flow-through’ rockfill drains can be 100 m high, thousands of metres long, and usually have a stream flowing through their base. When the stream that supplies the rock drain floods, the ability of the drain to convey water is exceeded by its supply, and a large but temporary pool develops at the upstream end of the dump. More importantly, the free surface within the rock drain becomes elevated, as does the point of exit at the downstream face. Because of historic instances of failures at the downstream face, the management of these buried streams and the hydraulic behaviour of the rock drains through which they flow are of interest. The behaviour of homogeneous embankments comprised of coarse rockfill has many similarities to the behaviour of long rockfill drains. Methods for assessing the hydraulic performance of either are presented herein. Definition of the complete water surface ‘envelope’ and the tendency toward unravelling of the downstream face receive primary focus. It is demonstrated that the hydraulic gradient directly beneath the seepage face and small variations in its direction play a far greater role than seepage-face overflow in promoting unravelling failure, and argues that all such deposits are, in effect, embankment dams that should fall under the applicable national dam safety regulations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".