EAMS

The Erosion Assessment and Modelling System (EAMS) is an integrated package of engineering and environmental software to allow the efficient design and assessment of proposed mine rehabilitation design. The package is designed to be an adjunct to dedicated mine operations software (eg. MINCOM, Vulcan, Autocad, Datamine) and is designed to easily work with these packages. EAMS integrates a range of tools that have developed over the last decade for hydrology and erosion research using digital terrain maps (DTM). As such its algorithms for DTM analysis have been extensively tested.

EAMS consists of two main components

  1. EAMS-Moscow. The data importing and analysis package. This package imports a broad a broad range of data types (both gridded and triangulated data) from a broad range of data sources and converts the elevation data into a form that the hydrology and erosion models can be used. In addition, an easy to use database of hydrology and erosion parameters derived from a range of mine sites is available for use in the hydrology and erosion assessment. A range of hydrology and erosion are output as well as expert output indicating regions of the landform that can be improved and suggesting methods for improvements.
  2. EAMS-Viewer. The data visualisation package. This package imports the simulation results from EAMS-Moscow and provides a broad range of views of the data. This package also allows for the input of advanced options, such as contour banks, regions with spatially varying runoff and erosion properties and modifications of elevations of the landform.

A third package is under development

  1. EAMS-Virtual Earthworks. This a package for the design of landform rehabilitation and has the ability to modify the landform using benches, contour banks, existing drainage lines. It has a series of economic packages for optimising landform design on the basis of earthworks costs while maintaining environmental acceptability.

The various packages integrated into EAMS have been been extensively used and tested in agricultural and mining applications. For the first time EAMS integrates these capabilities into a package specifically designed to address the sorts of problems addressed by the mining industry.

EAMS runs on a broad range of computer hardware. At the current time supported hardware includes Silicon Graphics IRIX workstations, Windows '95, '98 and Windows NT. Future plans include LINUX and Apple Macintosh workstations.



EAMS has been developed by a team headed by Associate Professor Garry Willgoose, Department of Civil, Surveying and Environmental Engineering, The University of Newcastle. For support enquiries email: eams@newcastle.edu.au or (02) 4921 6042.