Getting the most out of your mining project is hard enough, so ensuring your operation is increasing productivity and maximizing efficiencies is a must. Adjusting to changing conditions in the mine is vital to making sure that you’re never unprepared. Using technology assists with working in a smarter manner, and ensuring key data is accessible to decision-makers. Preparation and knowing exactly what is under the ground and in what quantities is an important component of getting any mine started. Utilising technology assists mining operations to do this. With the support of a platform like MICROMINE’s, operators can improve efficiencies in the exploration and mining processes. Technology can greatly assist mining companies to become a more efficient operation, with structured work practices and methodologies.
The Mining Module
MICROMINE’s module was specifically designed for mining engineers to provide them with powerful and intuitive tools for planning and design irrespective of whether the mine is a surface or underground. It has never been easier to develop a mine plan based on your organisation’s mining parameters and business fundamentals. Being able to turn complex raw data into planning and design tools miners can use in real-time is the benefit of technology. Ideally, data can be updated with new plot points as the project evolves, giving transparency of what’s happening in the mine in near real-time. Additionally, the ability to access to productivity features such as Vizex, form sets, Field Calculator, macros, Python scripting, and Plot Editor, mining operations can intuitively create pit design framework that vastly simplifies the design of your pits.
Underground mine engineers benefit from the MICROMINE integrated suite of CAD tools for carrying out mine layout design; drafting underground drives, rises, shafts, declines and inclines; and stope design and ring design, including drill fans, charging, stemming and volume calculations. Surface mine engineers benefit from MICROMINE Mining’s intuitive tools for designing an open pit using variable geotechnical parameters; converting between overall slope angle and batter angles/berm widths; and designing haul roads, slot ramps, switchbacks and cutbacks. Specialised tools for open pit blast pattern design include creating blast patterns, blast rows or single blastholes; clipping blastholes to a wireframe; defining the firing sequence and delays; and restricting blastholes to specified boundaries.
Scheduling
Scheduling overcomes the limitations of Gantt chart facilities in applications such as Microsoft Project®. Although these applications do enable a representation of a schedule, they are unable to adequately handle mining attributes such as tonnes, grades and equipment resources.
The MICROMINE Scheduler specifically is a smart technology that assists with short-term resource extraction planning, creating an optimum mineral extraction process to meet your mines objectives. Many mining operations use a manual scheduling process combining generic spreadsheet and project management applications. Although these tools can get the job done, they have shortcomings that can be unproductive and error-prone.
Using a dedicated Scheduler tool, allows the powerful mine planning and design tools of Micromine to generate 3D mining blocks. These define the tonnes and grade (or quality) of an orebody represented as a three-dimensional view of the material to be removed, forming the basis of the subsequent production sequencing. The information can be displayed against predetermined attributes and constraints to provide both a visual and temporal schedule that defines how each mining block will be extracted and over what period of time. Visual Explorer, or Vizex, is used for displaying 3D mining blocks and sequence animation in a spatial view, and the Gantt view is used for displaying the same mining blocks and their dependencies in a time-based view.
Pit Optimization
Pit optimization can be difficult with many factors at play for any mining operation. You can use pit optimization technologies typically to determine the most profitable underground or open pit, given a set of parameters. MICROMINE’s pit optimization uses the industry-standard Lerchs-Grossman (LG) algorithm. Given an ore deposit represented as a block model containing ore grades or block revenues, the LG algorithm determines the pit shape by identifying the overlying blocks that must be removed to provide access to each block within the block model.
The first outcome of pit optimisation is determining the ultimate pit that gives the highest possible undiscounted surplus between net revenue and total operating costs, without considering scheduling constraints or discounting. A nested pit shell analysis is then used to determine the discounted optimal pit. Nested pit shells are a sequence of ultimate pits generated by incrementing the commodity price across a range of values around the base price.
The optimal pit gives the highest possible net present value, considering all operational scheduling constraints (annual mining and processing productivity), discounting and recurring capital costs. By using powerful algorithms that have been proven to work and tested endlessly, pit mine operations can calculate the optimal pit shape and dimensions to yield the highest possible undiscounted surplus between net revenue and total operating costs.
The more powerful, useful pit optimization tools can control for open pit mine resources, economic factors, and metallurgical parameters. Controlling these factors within the pit mine dataset can avoid shortfalls and common mistakes that lead to mismanaged mines operating under maximum efficiency. Tools such as these can provide shareholders, workers, and managers the ability to maximize efficiency from the planning and exploration stage in a mining operation, to the production phase. The power to analyze and use large amounts of data quickly is invaluable. Streamlining these processes allows for improved efficiency through resource, time, and/or cost reduction, and productivity improvement. In general, streamlining involves technology, automating manual processes, increasing uptime, and reducing process redundancies and inefficiencies. Thus, streamlining require capital purchases, changes to staffing levels or process flow, and complex statistical analyses.
