Mine Tailing Particles: Roundness and Sphericity Assessment by an Image-Based Program

Anthropogenic activity has created mine waste, particularly tailings, which are generated by many mining operations, and their storage provides an enormous challenge to designers and operators. The mechanical properties and characteristics of mine tailings can depend on many features such as the content of the desirable mineral in the ore, the efficiency of the mineral processing stage, and the duration of a specific operation. Furthermore, the microstructure of these deposits is influenced by the depositional technique used. Sphericity and roundness are physical characteristics that affect the mechanical behavior of mine tailings, and these parameters can often be ignored due to difficulty or subjectivity in obtaining them. In this paper, an image-based program has been used to assess the roundness and sphericity of tailing mine particles. To calibrate this procedure, digital images that contain geometrical objects were compared with results obtained with the procedure put forth here. Using a stereoscopic microscope equipped with an axial digital camera, digital images of different mine tailing grains at different scales were obtained to assess the sphericity and the roundness applying this approach.