Schools

Andy Fourie

My research focusses on improving practices related to the management of mining residue materials, particularly mine tailings. Ensuring there are no further catastrophic failures of tailings storage facilities, such as have occurred over recent years, is the primary theme of my research. The problems I work on relate to characterisation of tailings strength under static and dynamic loading and associated methods of analysis of stability. My work utilises a range of both laboratory and field testing techniques, as well as numerical modeling. Recent work includes evaluating how to avoid generation of tailings completely by developing novel in situ extraction techniques for hard-rock ore bodies.

I joined UWA in 2005, moving from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I was the Associate Dean for Research, and leader of the Waste Impact Minimisation Programme. I hold a Bachelors degree in Civil Engineering (cum laude) and a Masters degree in Engineering, both from Wits, and a PhD in Engineering from Imperial College, London.

Vijayakanthan Kunasegaram

Vijayakanthan Kunasegaram is working as a Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia since May 2023. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and both his Master of Engineering and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (TIT), Japan. He was awarded Japanese Government (MEXT) Scholarship from 2014 to 2019 during his post-graduate research works, his PhD research focused on centrifuge modelling of implant geotechnical structures using novel press-in-technology, in collaboration with GIKEN LTD Japan, and Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC). He also served as a lecturer in civil engineering at the department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, South Eastern University of Sri Lanka (SEUSL) for a period of three and half years before joining with UWA.

Vijayakanthan Kunasegaram was attached to the Amira’s Future Tailings Program P1217 (Evaluation of Mine Tailings Storage Facilities (TSF) Monitoring Technologies), before moving to Future Tails. Currently his research focused on;

• Centrifuge modelling of tailings storage facilities (TSFs) to understand the deformation and failure mechanism of tailing embankments with raising phreatic surface.
• Shear wave velocity measurements in geotechnical centrifuge model to develop suitable monitoring strategies for tracking the structural health of tailings storage facilities (TSFs) in collaboration with Institute of Mine Seismology (IMS)
• Simulation of static liquefaction, estimation of in-situ state parameter using inflight CPTu and study the consequences of flow deformation in the downstream of a TSF. 

Findings from one of his centrifuge modelling works related to the simulation of static liquefaction can be accessed through the following link.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7287989943090454528/

Apart from Centrifuge modelling, he also investigating the behaviour of tailings throughout a wide range of laboratory element tests. His latest research includes the intact block testing, load controlled triaxial tests, resonant column tests, direct simple shear and cone penetration testing of tailing embankments in centrifuge.

Bandana Tiwari

Bandana is a geotechnical engineer from Nepal, currently in the first year of her PhD. Her research explores the uncertainties associated with common empirical approaches for the characterisation of large strain behaviour of tailings and their interpretation methods, looking to stablish a unified approach for the determination of the residual strength of tailings.

She completed her bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Tribhuvan University, Nepal, in 2016. She was awarded a CSC type-A scholarship to study in China from the Ministry of Education, Government of Nepal, after a merit-based national level entrance examination. She completed her master’s degree in civil engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2020. The topic of her research was the influence of particle physical properties, including particles shape, size, and gradation, on the mechanical behaviour of Shanghai deep sand. She published a journal article based on her research in a first quartile journal as first author. Before starting her PhD, she was working as a geotechnical engineer in a consulting company in Nepal.

Ana de Mattos Telles

Ana Claudia Telles is a Brazilian civil engineer with a master's degree in geotechnical engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she studied the mechanical behaviour of sandy iron ore tailings from the Fundão Dam. Her main professional experiences were as a university professor, lecturing soil mechanics and environmental geotechnics units, geotechnical consultant in the tailings area and head of a commercial geotechnical laboratory in Rio de Janeiro, working on offshore and tailings projects. In the Future Tails, her research consists of advanced laboratory tests and numerical modelling to evaluate various aspects of the contractive behaviour of unsaturated filtered tailings.