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.

Fernández-Lavín A. y Ovando-Shelley, E. (2021) “Mine tailings particles: roundness and sphericity assessment by an image-based program”, Developments in Sustainable Geomaterials and Environmental Geotechnics, Proceedings of the 6th GeoChina International Conference on Civil & Transportation Infrastructures: From Engineering to Smart & Green Life Cycle Solutions – Nanchang, China, July 2021, K. Yao et al. (Eds.), pp. 23–32.