Framing Guidelines for Constructing Structures on back fills from

existing state of the Art

1.0 Introduction
India and many other highly populated country is facing tremendous scarcity of land infact it
is true for the countries of Indian Subcontinent as well as the other developing and developed
countries like Indonesia, Japan and China. The process of mining has undergone change from
underground tunnelling to Open-Cast Mining while the process of Open-Cast mining are used
when deposits of commercially useful minerals or rocks are found near the surface; that is,
where the overburden is relatively thin or the material of interest is structurally unsuitable for
tunnelling (as would be the case for sand, cinder, and gravel), Where as for minerals that
occur deep below the surface where the overburden is thick or the mineral occurs as veins in
hard rock underground mining methods extract the valued material.
So use of Open Cast Mining has generated lands with loosely filled up by backfill materials
and large number of such filled up open-cast mines is presently not in a position to be used
for constructing habitant and developing human settlement thereby Eg :
In this context it is a challenge to develop adequate technology for such land filled with mine
spoil which can be utilized for constructing building and other utility structure relatively very
limited effort has been directed in this particular field as most of these developed countries
like USA, Russia, Canada or Australia dont face these severe problem because of very less
population density in this context the present article makes an attempt to summarize the
existing research outcome in this particular direction collating the guidelines from the
existing literature so that some real steps for implementation becomes available for practicing
Engineer also to identify the gaps in this research field for coming up with complete set of
guidelines for achieving the mentioned goal the following section present the outcome of the
existing literature in systematically categorised.

2.0 State of the Art

Surface mining is common practice in most countries for extracting coal and other minerals.
The operation is being combined with increasing environmental concern the reason leads to
strict regulation and requirement aimed at reducing environmental impact and creating stable,
self-sustaining land that can be put to productive use in long term. In most cases the
rehabilitation land is used for agricultural purpose but due to the increasing population it is
increasingly being used for recreational, industrial or residential use but in the present state
very few attempts have been made for constructing structures on backfill due to the problem
of differential settlement associated with backfill material which happens due to the
inadequate bearing capacity of soil and, the cause which leads to inadequacy in its bearing
capacity can possibly be grouped after going through different literatures as:

1. Geotechnical characteristics of soil.

2. self weight at original moisture content.
3. Settlement due to building loads
4. fluctuating water table leading to hydrocompression.
2.1 Geotechnical characteristics of soil
The heterogeneous composition of the coal mine backfill in general comprises mudstone,
siltstone, shale, sandstone, etc. (Charles 2008, Peter Waddell 2012) the behaviour of
settlement generally depends on the percentage of their composition. (Peter Waddell 2012)
behaviour of the fill material which generally leads to settlement is the volumetric stability of
the composition which ultimately defines the shrink and swell characteristics of the fill
material the sample of sandstone, weathered shale and fresh shale when tested had plasticity
index of 0% (non plastic), 23% and 10% as far as linear shrinkage is concerned the value is
maximum for the weathered shale thus the creep strain value is also the highest thus the
settlement characteristics can be well concluded to be decided depending on the
characteristics and properties of soil.
2.2 Self weight at original moisture content
The work on the settlement of fill (Meyerhof et.al.1951) shows depending on the nature of
the backfill settlement behaviour changes and which shows that the settlement of fill material
varies from 30% for domestic refuse to less than 1% for compacted rockfill and their is
subsequent change in the settlement behaviour with the degree of compaction and nature of
fill but certainly the settlement percentage reaches a constant value in due course of time,
which may lead us to conclude that if the fill material is left for long duration of time the
possible consolidation settlement will happen and the fill material is ready for use but the
question still remains unanswerable as how long will it take for this to happen?
(Charles 2008)The different case studies on different types of fill shows that their is a linear
relationship between creep compression and logarithm of time that has been elapsed from the
moment the load was applied and thus the simple settlement that occurs when the load was
applied without varying the stress and moisture conition as
= H log

t2
t1

where, is the settlement of the fill

H is the fill height between times t1 anad t2
is the vertical compression between 1 and 10 years since the fill placement
Thus the time duration for minimum settlement can be significantly be calculated from the
above mentioned equation but as the above mentioned equation is modelled for the self
weight creep thus the settlement behaviour can only be modelled for building which has very
low loads and shallow foundation. Thus the rate of settlement for a particular duration can be
predicted and the nature of rate of settlement can be well predicted with only limitation of
low rise building.

2.3 Settlement due to building loads

In general the settlement in building can be categorised into two parts immediate settlement
and long term settlement the immediate which generally happens with the application of
building load