Ground Support Corrosion Assessments

Corrosion of ground support systems in mines is common. Understanding how degraded your ground support and its impact on safety is a difficult problem to solve.

MCIT has developed a process to assess the corrosivity of the underground environment and the severity of corrosion damage for a range of ground support types. This involves environmental mapping of the underground excavations in combination with qualitative and quantitative assessments of the condition of reinforcement and support systems.

An understanding of the spatial distribution of the data combined with corrosion severity is very useful to understand where areas of higher or lower risk may exist within your mine. Areas of higher risk can then be targeted with additional controls to manage the possibility of ground support failure due to corrosion.

MCIT also manufacture and analyse corrosion coupons or tags. Coupons provide a direct measurement of corrosion rates for different environments within a mine. They are the simplest and most widely used method of corrosion rate monitoring.