Fault identification in opencast coalmine bench through integrated approach of ERT, GPR and borehole data

The Indian coal deposits mostly consisted of disturbed geology and therefore the major faults are often encountered during mining. The sudden encounter of these faults lowers the rate of production of mines and sometime leads to complete shutting of productivity. Though, analysis of core samples of production boreholes drilled in the mining area is used for identification of fault location, but it’s a very costly as well as time consuming operation. Drilling production boreholes in a working bench of an opencast mine sometimes leads to complete shutting down of all the mining activities as per safety procedures, which hampers the production as well as induce a heavy financial loss. The surface geophysical methods are a possible solution for monitoring the near surface geological discontinuities as they are very cost effective and have less operational as well as interpretation time, which does not hamper the mine production for a longer time. A similar study has been carries out on the Kusmunda opencast coal mine of Central India, where mine productivity got hampered due to sudden encounter of a geological fault in the working bench.