A semi-empirical approach for estimation of bed shear stress in a tailings pond

Abstract

Wind-driven waves and currents exert shear stress on the bed of a tailings pond. A semi-empirical approach for estimating this bed shear stress is presented in this paper. For the first time in a mine tailings storage facility, the current-induced component of the bed shear stress was obtained using 1,200-kHz acoustic Doppler current profiler measurements of in situ currents and a log-law fit to the mean velocity profiles, while the wave-induced portion was calculated using empirical wave hindcasting equations. The total bed shear stress was obtained by non-linear addition of wave and current components using a wave–current interaction approach. The study was conducted in the middle cell of the Shebandowan tailings storage facility, northern Ontario, Canada. The measured currents facilitated the visualization of the complex near-bed circulatory flow pattern in the pond. The estimated combined wave–current bed shear stress varied from 0.0006 to 0.16 Pa with an average value of 0.028 Pa. The results also showed that linear addition of bed shear stresses due to waves and currents could underestimate the total bed shear stress. A comparison of the results of the present work to those of previous studies suggests that it is more reliable to obtain current-induced bed shear stress from field measurements than to estimate it from empirical equations.