Surface and Underground Excavations—Methods, Techniques and Equipment

Excavation is a multi-disciplinary activity in the areas of civil, construction and mining engineering. The excavation industry is booming because of the yearly creation of thousands of kilometers of tunnels, many mine openings and millions of cubic meters of large underground excavations for transportation, mineral mining, oil and gas storage, hydroelectric power station construction, defense facilities and for the disposal of hazardous waste.

Surface and Underground Excavations Methods, Techniques and Equipment provides a comprehensive text on the latest technologies and developments in excavation for any type of surface or underground excavation. In the first few chapters, unit operations are covered, including drilling, explosives and blasting, mucking, haulage, hoisting, supports and reinforcement. Subsequently, excavation techniques are described for various operations, like tunneling, raising, sinking, drifting, stoping, quarrying and surface-mining, underground mining, pillar blasting and liquidation. In addition, the design, planning and development of excavations are treated in a separate chapter. Special attention is paid to the construction of surface and subsurface excavations, including caverns and to new methodologies to select stoping methods through incremental analysis. For practical illustration, the final chapter contains case studies dealing with heavy underground blasting during pillar recoveries.

This expanded second edition has been wholly revised, removing obsolete information and including latest trends and best practices as well as questions at the end of each chapter. It is now fully up-to-date and even more appealing to students and those with a general or professional interest in surface and underground excavations. As such, this book is particularly suited to students in earth sciences, geology and in civil, mining and construction engineering.

Dr. Ratan Tatiya is a consultant in the areas of excavation, construction, mining and allied disciplines and in a career spanning more than 42 years he has held senior positions in the industry, as a professor, researcher and consultant and has worked with multinationals from more than 40 countries. His industrial background has led to this book being industrially relevant and his academic background has ensured that the fundamentals and basics required to help readers have been included.