Caving 2018 Conference – Summary of GEOVIA Papers

As covered in our previous blog post, the Caving 2018 Conference took place in October in Vancouver and was ‘sold out; with over 250 attendees participating in the event.

GEOVIA was well represented at the event, both via direct papers (where Caving Business Unit employees were authors of papers) and indirectly where our clients have made positive references to the papers.

This blog provides a short summary of the GEOVIA “direct” papers at the Conference:

1. Palabora Lift 1 block cave: Understanding the grade behavior

T Diering, Dassault Systèmes, Canada; SN Ngidi, JJ Bezuidenhout, HD Paetzold, Palabora Mining Company, South Africa

This paper outlined how the grade modeling at Palabora has evolved over the years and the huge impact that the open pit failure in 2004 (below) had on the mine plans. Core software for the modeling was PCBC. It outlines 18 years of calibration work done to keep the model in line with what has actually been produced from the mine.

Michael Diering (Nevsun Resources) and Tony Diering

Stephan Arndt (Monash University), Tony Diering and Rodney Hocking (Oz Minerals)

3. Footprint finder tool for sublevel caving

T Diering, Dassault Systèmes, Canada; F Breed, De Beers Group of Companies, South Africa

This introduced a new tool called FFSLC or Footprint Finder for SLC. Freddie Breed from De Beers Venetia Mine presented the paper and also showed how the tool had added significant value to the Venetia Underground Project. FFSLC is the equivalent for SLC mining as Whittle is for open pit or Stope Optimizer is for other underground mining methods. The slide below shows how the Footprint Finder tool was able to add value compared to a previous optimization exercise. The FF tool took two days compared to the previous exercise of several weeks.

Michael Diering (Nevsun Resources) and Tony Diering