A common and important task in mining industry is to estimate the settlement or final volume of the tailings or backfill associated with sedimentation and self-weight consolidation. Up to now however, most existing analytical solutions were developed by only considering the settlement induced by consolidation. In this paper, the process of shrinkage tests has been compared with those of sedimentation and consolidation. It was shown that the pore water and particles movement in the sedimentation are very similar to that in the normal shrinkage. The void ratio at the end of sedimentation is thus for the first time considered to be equal to the void ratio at desaturation onset of shrinkage tests. An analytical solution was then proposed to estimate the settlement of tailings or backfill by considering the sedimentation and consolidation. To validate the proposed analytical solution, tailing deposition tests were conducted in two molds to simulate the tailings impoundment and underground mine stope. The required parameters were obtained through shrinkage and consolidation tests. Good agreements were obtained between the measured settlements and those calculated by the proposed solution. The proposed solution can thus be considered as validated and used to evaluate the settlement of tailings or backfill slurry.

采矿业的一项共同而重要的任务是估算与沉降和自重固结有关的尾矿或回填的沉降量或最终体积。但是，到目前为止，大多数现有的分析解决方案都是通过仅考虑合并引起的沉降来开发的。本文将收缩测试的过程与沉降和固结的过程进行了比较。结果表明，孔隙水和颗粒在沉降过程中的运动与正常收缩过程中的非常相似。因此，第一次认为沉降结束时的空隙率等于收缩试验在去饱和开始时的空隙率。然后提出一种分析解决方案，通过考虑沉淀和固结来估算尾矿或回填的沉降。为了验证所提出的分析解决方案，在两个模具中进行了尾矿沉积测试，以模拟尾矿蓄水量和地下矿场。所需参数是通过收缩和固结测试获得的。在测得的和解与拟议解决方案计算出的和解之间获得了良好的协议。因此，可以将提出的解决方案视为经过验证的解决方案，并用于评估尾矿或回填浆液的沉降。