ZOSTRICH GEOTECHNICAL

Zostrich Geotechnical was founded in August 1995 as Ursa Engineering. The company's focus has been, and will remain, premium rock mechanics engineering and rock mass characterization work, primarily for the mining industry.

Over time, the company has diversified to a certaint extent, primarily to fill niche needs related to rock mechanics consulting. The company's main areas of business are as follow.

ROCK MECHANICS

Rock mass characterization and development of analytical and support techniques in difficult situations is our forte. Our experience covers the entire gammut of potential rock characteristics, from the highly altered, very weak rocks of the Carlin Trend in Nevada to the extremely competent country rocks found in the diamond country in the Canadian north. We specialize in premium rock mechanics consulting and take pride in the product produced by this company.

GEOLOGIC STRUCTURAL INTERPRETATION FOR GEOTECHNICS

The probabilistic techniques utilized by Zostrich Geotechnical require detailed structural geologic models. As such, techniques were developed for characterizing the major and minor (fabric) structure in rock for design purposes. This included the use of photogrammetric techniques,coincident and complimentary field mapping techniques for photogrammetric work, and detailed analytical and data reduction techniques for the same. This has evolved into a one week applied structural interpretation course for geologists and geotechnical engineers as well as being applied by Zostrich Geotechnical in its own designs.

Z-FABRIC

The program Z-Fabric was developed to provide the industry a tool for characterizing discontinuity spatial characteristics and utilizing these for modelling purposes. The primary goal was to provide a package for predicting bench face angles given the discontinuity orientation, persistence, and density characteristics for a specific rock mass as well as the discontinuity shear strength distribution. As everything else, it evolved, becoming a tool for major structural interpretation as well. The program is presently available as a beta test version.

MONITORING

Zostrich Geotechnical has developed monitoring systems utilizing time domain reflectometry (TDR) and optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) as applied to geotechnical situations. TDR/OTDR's real time, digital nature allows remote application of the technique with telemetry communication of the data from the monitoring area to a central site for near instantaneous analysis. This provides real time warnings regarding subsurface rock or soil displacement.