Objective
Objectives and content
The EU dimension stone industry, which mostly involves
small and medium size enterprises, enjoys at present
health and growth. Exhaustion, however, of near surface
reserves coupled with environmental effects to the
surroundings forces the industry to move gradually
underground as an alternative to closure. To continue
its successful operation in the difficult and unfamiliar
underground terrain and to face this challenge and
involvement in a risk business, an integrated scientific
approach to the problems associated with underground
marble exploitation is urgently needed in order to
minimise expected rising production costs due to: lower
recovery, limiting space of operation, pillar and roof
stability, to mention only a few of the problems an
underground quarry operation will encounter. The risk
problem can be met by predicting block recovery in terms
of size, quality and quantity, and the rising costs by
optimising design of the rooms and pillars since it
affects both, recovery through size and orientation of
underground works, and productivity through space
availability and safety of working conditions. As the
currently extant design methodologies have been developed
in a piecemeal fashion over a number of years, they
neither reflect the state of the art of rock engineering
nor are they adequate to determine exactly what is the
minimum amount of mineral to be left in place. This
latter deficiency stems in part from the difficulty in
predicting the mechanical behaviour of the material, and
in part from the critical importance of not
underestimating the support requirements.
This proposal, which is addressed both to already
operating underground marble quarries and to quarry
owners that soon will be facing the problem of going
underground or closing down, seeks to provide new
improved design and planning optimisation techniques for
underground quarry excavations. These techniques, by
evaluating all possible quarry layouts and production
scenarios, will be able to predict the most cost
effective and safe layout that will lead to maximum block
recovery of such sizes and quality that the market
demands. The work is based on careful 3D modelling of
the rock mass structure coupled with modern surveying
techniques and advanced computer simulation methods.
These techniques will be used to develop a reliable
geometric model of the available and recoverable block
system, which in conjunction to the understanding of the
global mechanical behaviour will allow the optimum
design, and the most quality and cost effective planning
of the underground marble exploitation process.
It is anticipated that the general guidelines developed
as part of this project will be made available to the
industry at large, in the form of simple design manuals.
The consortium formed to undertake this project comprises
quarrying enterprises, Universities and Research
Organisations from Greece, France, Italy, Germany and
Portugal. In order to ensure that the final methodology
is widely applicable, the quarrying enterprises cover a
diverse range of geomechanical environments and minerals.
This project will address the needs outlined in the
following sections of the Brite Euram III work programme:
1.1 1.3 2.3 and 1.4.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences economics and business economics production economics productivity
- natural sciences mathematics applied mathematics mathematical model
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Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
Coordinator
11526 Athens
Greece
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.