Working deep underground can be dangerous. Every underground mine manager has had to order mine support bags. No matter how careful, falls of the ground can occur unexpectedly, and the result can be deadly and extremely expensive to clean up.
Every mine manager knows that good quality underground mine support products are needed to prevent rockfalls. It is a key component of any successful underground mining operation. Various technologies exist on the market to prevent underground rockfalls, from old fashioned wooden beams to sophisticated hydraulic piston-type arms.
Quality Or Price?
On the cheap side is wood. Wood is a classic option since it can be somewhat flexible and can therefore handle the movements of the earth underground without snapping ‒ if you use the right kind of wood.
However, the problem is that wood deteriorates. When wood rots, it becomes brittle and prone to breaking. When the wood becomes weak, the mine support is prone to failing, putting lives and equipment at risk. The long and short of it is that wood is cheap but not reliable enough in today’s ESG-driven expectation of zero harm.
On the other side of the spectrum are the more high-tech steel supports, some of them operating on winches like carjacks while others work on hydraulics. These might not break nearly as easily as old wood and are definitely far more reliable. However, they can be a lot more expensive. Installing these kinds of support systems mine-wide can be an expensive affair.
There are various other kinds of supports not mentioned here, from things like bolting, shotcrete and steel webbing and netting, but each of these has a role in certain circumstances underground and is often used in conjunction with structural support systems.
Quality And Price
There is another option that is neither cheap wood nor expensive steel but rather something else entirely: extremely tough woven polypropylene bags filled with cementitious grout material that, when stacked, become extremely strong and stable rock-like pillars.
At Tufbag, our polypropylene mine support bags are made with a double textile layer to ensure that the already-tough-as-nails bags are double as tough as before to ensure that they can easily withstand the extremely harsh conditions of underground mining.
The beauty of our stackable mine support bags is that they are scalable, meaning that you can put as many or as few into a gap as you like to make sure that there is no room for a fall-of-ground event.
What’s also fantastic about our mine support bags is that they are fast and easy to install. Moreover, they are much more cost-effective than the many elaborate high-tech steel contraptions available on the market that perform no better.
The simple concept behind our mine support bags means that they need just about zero maintenance. However, if there is a bag that needs replacing for whatever reason, it is very easy and inexpensive to do.
To order your mine support products now, contact Tufbag today!