The Case Study has been Provided by TenCate Geosynthetics Asia
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The Challenge – A large Indonesian mining corporation operating a remote open-pit coal mine, faced a problem on how to dewater silt sediments from settling ponds that had reached their capacity. There was a shortage of free land space and cleaning the ponds required a constant combination of silt dredging and truck relocation in a constant cycle to prevent runoff with high levels of suspended solids (TSS) discharging into and polluting adjacent river channels. The cost of dewatering the ponds soon became prohibitive.
The Solution – As part of the settling ponds cleanout efforts, a TenCate Geotube® dewatering facility was constructed to contain and dewater slurry extracted from the ponds. In total, more than 300 Geotube® units have been used to dewater more than 1,000,000 m³ of sediments containing 170,000 m³ of dry solids annually. To optimize land space, the Geotube® dewatering tubes are stacked up to seven layers high based on standardized units with a circumference of 36.6m and lengths up to 61.4m to create large solid landfill structures.
This project has the distinction of being one of the biggest Geotube® dewatering projects ever undertaken in the world providing a wealth of knowledge on the economics of extreme large scale Geotube® dewatering.
Learn more about the challenges, design, construction and performance of Geotube® dewatering as a proactive and cost effective permanent solution in this project by downloading the full Case Study above.