The research, being sponsored by Anglo Coal Australia and ACARP, will also address a geotechnical skills’ shortage in the coal industry.

This is the first time the JK Centre has been involved in an underground coal geomechanics project, and could potentially save the industry millions of dollars, according to Anglo’s chief mining engineer, Bruce Robertson.

“The economic benefits from the research are potentially enormous,” he said.

PhD student Michael Callan started working on the project in 2002 after graduating with a mining engineering degree at The University of Queensland.

“It's interesting that we don’t have a high degree of control over the pure geomechanics of longwall operations, therefore it is a fertile area for research,” Robertson said.

Callan will visit Anglo four longwall mine sites in Australia to collect data, take measurements and develop relevant numerical and other geotechnical models to understand the interaction between powered supports and the strata around the mine opening.

To date he has conducted field research at Anglo’s German Creek and Moranbah North operations, and has started to analyse data that will lead to a predictive model.

“It’s not uncommon to see support capacities in excess of 1000 tonnes on a typical longwall installation,” he said. “But there is no real basis to say that mining operations need that much capacity.

It is hoped that load pressures on the supports will characterise the loadings for particular geological conditions and mine sites, which will potentially lead to the development of a forward prediction model for impending roof conditions.

These characteristics will then be compared against those at other mine sites as part of the process towards building an empirical model for support capacity ratings for individual longwall installations.

Between now and 2005 Callan plans to develop the load prediction model, and work towards a standardised system of longwall support prediction.

Since the project started, Callan’s JKMRC supervisor Dr Bob Trueman successfully applied to ACARP to extend the scope of the study to widen the database to longwall installations at other Australian coal mines.

Robertson said one of the reasons why Anglo chose the JK Centre was because of the desire to develop another geomechanics PhD in the coal industry.

“There is a shortage of geotechnical engineers in the coal industry and we saw this as a proactive step that Anglo could make,” he said.