Revisiting Brumadinho Dam Failure: A Methodology Study

Abstract

This is a methodology testing study that uses the case history of Vale Mining’s Brumadinho Dam disaster and data from the Barcelona investigation report. This study aims to compare the results of two constitutive models for tailings: CASM and NorSand, running in the finite element program Plaxis 2D. The same senior authors carried out a previous study on four tailings dams and adopted the NorSand model and parameters obtained from piezocone and laboratory tests. Therefore, this paper aims to check if the same methodology would predict the Brumadinho Dam failure. The results show that both methods can predict Brumadinho failure, and the triggering mechanism suggested in the Barcelona report seems to be the cause of failure.