University of New South Wales Emeritus Professor Jim Galvin will run the first of these workshops in Queensland and New South Wales later this month.

The first lot of workshops are based on Volume 1 of a two-volume textbook, Geotechnical Engineering in Underground Coal Mining, which Galvin is in the process of writing.

“[The first workshop] will start off with some basic theory and lead through pillar load, the load on coal pillars, then on to the strength of coal pillars ... how to calculate the probability that a coal pillar will remain stable," he said.

Galvin said one of the major challenges for geotechnical engineers is the dynamic environment they work in.

“The thing that people have to appreciate with geotechnical engineering is that it's characterised by uncertainty,” he said.

“There are no unique design equations or formulas for working out how strong structures are or what load they will sustain … in the mining environment it's a dynamic environment, it’s changing all the time, and so it's characterised by this pervasive presence of uncertainty."

Galvin said the primary aim of the first workshop is to make participants aware of the different design techniques available and when to apply them.

“Different formulas apply depending on what the function of the coal pillar is, and there hasn’t been a really good understanding that that is the case,” he said.

“The stability of the mine at the end of the day depends on both the behaviour of the pillar and the behaviour of the excavation, and you can't treat either separately."

While participants will need to have an understanding of basic maths, Galvin said he would make use of case studies to make the principles of geotechnical engineering easier to understand.

“Often you can pick the learnings up out of just going through the case study and seeing what happened and discussing why it happened and what you might do to prevent it," he said.

Galvin said the workshops will follow on from a similar series of workshops that he ran between 1994 and 1996.

“At that time every mine manager in New South Wales and every mines inspector in New South Wales and Queensland attended those workshops," Galvin said.

“This is really picking up where those workshops left off and refreshing people and taking people through what we've learned in the past 15 years."

The workshops will run on May 16 to 17 in Emerald, Queensland, and May 23 to 24 in Wangi Wangi, New South Wales. For more information email Michele@emenem.com.au