An empirical equation predicting the saturated hydraulic conductivity of tailings

324 data points on the saturated hydraulic conductivity (k) of various hard rock mine tailings are collected from previous publications. The applicability of existing empirical equations for hard rock mine tailings are assessed based on this database collected. Results show that with a greater exponent of d10, the correlation between the measured and predicted k is greatly improved. An empirically modified version of the Kozeny-Carman equation is then proposed for predicting the saturated k of tailings and compared with the database. The proposed equation gives the best fit with a varying exponent greater than 2 for d10. Finally, the impact of particle shape on k is discussed.