It's time to conclude our series about reserve estimation for block cave mines! In our previous posts we have detailed the factors you should take into account when calculating a mineable ore reserve computation for a block cave mine. As a conclusion, we offer a concise summary of the parameters as a takeaway and the full downloadable White Paper to help you start a new project.
By Tony Diering, Ph.D. VP Caving Business Unit Dassault Systèmes, GEOVIA
SUMMARY
A concise summary of the above factors has been put into Table 2 to provide a check list of factors to consider during a block cave evaluation.
THE PCBC SOFTWARE
Considerable time and effort has been spent over the years to provide consistent reporting. A balance is required between the need to develop and improve the flow algorithms against the need to provide consistent and repeatable reporting.
Another consideration is that there are no analytic solutions against which to validate results. Instead, results are validated against observations of historical mining. But, this validation process usually points to new ways to improve the algorithms providing improved calibration.
Attempts are also made to validate reserve statements with other general purpose software packages, which do not have mixing algorithms. These comparisons are useful, but not capable of providing a full validation. A consequence of the above is that a good balance of caution and user experience is required for more complex analyses.
CONCLUSIONS
The GEOVIA PCBC software has evolved over more than 25 years to work with the above situations. Every block cave has its own unique challenges, but most of these will fall into the above categories. When starting a new project, it is not known beforehand which of the above factors will be key drivers and which can be largely ignored. Thus, it is hoped that the check list provided in this paper will aid with the evaluation of future block cave mining projects.
REFERENCES
Diering, T, (2007). Template Mixing An Alternative Depletion Engine for Block Cave Scheduling, Proceedings APCOM 2007, Santiago, pp. 313 – 320
Diering, T, (2008). Block cave scheduling with a piece of paper, Proceedings MassMin, Lulea
Diering, T. (2010). Block Cave production scheduling using PCBC. Proceedings SME conference. Phoenix, USA.
Laubscher, D. (1994). Cave Mining: State of the Art. SAIMM , October, 279 - 293.
Richter, O and Diering, T (2004) Production scheduling at Finsch Diamond Mine, South Africa. MassMin, Santiago
▶ Download the White Paper
Access all available white papers and technical articles:
GEOVIA GEMS PCBC caving
