Particularly at the earlier stages of a rock engineering project, the lack of appropriate data manifests itself in the form of increased uncertainty and difficulties in characterizing rock mass variability in an objective manner. When mine-scale problems are considered, it is not possible to sample all of the rock mass, therefore a relative large number
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This presentation will cover the evolution of block size distribution (BSD) within a draw column during block cave mining. BSD plays an important role in controlling gravitational flow, secondary fragmentation, and fines migration in broken ore—all of which are fundamental in preparing a reliable feasibility assessment for a potential caving operation. However, there is a
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GEOVIA’s PCBC software has been used to model fines migration in various ways for over twenty years. There are three different flow mechanisms in PCBC which allow some form of fines migration to be simulated. The first is Pre-Vertical Mixing in which fines material is assumed to move downwards faster than coarser components. The second
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The welcoming note and introduction will briefly describe the concept and philosophy of the Cave Mining Forum which is primarily to connect professionals from the mining industry. Jarek will also provide a brief overview of the current cave mining world, past experiences and challenges. This presentation summarizes a talk given during the second workshop of
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This presentation will address a selection of papers delivered at recent conferences on the subject of hydraulic fracturing in cave mining. The focus will be on preconditioning with hydraulic fracturing and other applications of hydraulic fracturing in cave mining. This presentation summarizes a talk given during the second workshop of the Cave Mining Forum.
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This presentation will discuss the design criteria directly impacted by fragmentation in the cave mining setting. It will also highlight some of the current tools available for prediction and analysis of fragmentation, as well as the reliability and potential short comings of fragmentation prediction. This presentation summarizes a talk given during the second workshop of
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The industry perception is that sublevel caving is a “dirty mining method” (i.e. high dilution and low recovery). However, there were several successful sublevel cave mines executed in the past. The success of a sublevel cave mine is not by chance – they are engineered to perform. This talk will review some of the recent
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The presentation will explain the benefits of a fully flexible, macro-driven cashflow model to rapidly assemble, evaluate, and rank strategic options in complex cave mines. The model allows for multiple production schedules across multiple caves (typically produced from PCBC) to be re-scheduled and assembled into coherent strategies and compared across a range of evaluation parameters.
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Recent improvements to PCBC and PCSLC are discussed. The trend for software development as well as some ideas for the future integration of PCBC and PCSLC into the Dassault Systemes software solutions will be outlined. Key areas are around daily operations management and improved 3D flow modeling.
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This presentation will provide a brief overview of automation in the mining industry; in particular, its application to cave mining. Mine automation becomes more popular as it improves safety and eases fleet utilization and production rates. It can also reduce maintenance and operating costs. However, the implementation of mine automation requires full analysis of its
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