Abstract: The frozen of tailings can affect the stability of the tailing dam. The uniaxial compression tests were carried out to study the mechanical characteristics of artificial frozen tailing and its four influence factors. There are three types of failure modes for frozen tailing specimen， i.e. shear failure in oblique section， tensile failure in radial direction and composite failure mode. The stress-strain curve of the frozen tailings samples can be divided into four stages: the axial compressive tests as initial stain softening stage， linear strain hardening stage， nonlinear strain hardening stage and softening stage. In the four factors， the uniaxial compressive strength is logarithmically related to the average particle size， exponentially related to the dry density ，linearly related to the moisture and parabolically related to the loading rate. The deformation modulus of frozen tailings is logarithmically related to the average particle size， exponentially related to the dry density and loading rate， and parabolically related to the water content.

Key words: tailings, uniaxial compression, mechanical property, deformation characteristics, frozen tailings