Authored by Daniel Villa, GEOVIA Industry Process Consultant Expert.
1. The value of parametric mine design in block caving
An international copper mining company had one successful block caving project up and running and had developed a similar design for a second. Before committing to that design, however, the company wanted to find out if it would be possible to increase productivity and reduce operating costs at the new mine by changing the original design to accommodate new, larger load-haul-dump (LHD) machines.
However, the company knew that this modification could have a number of consequences. For example, it could result in changes to:
- tunnel sections, making pillars smaller and reducing stability, and
- the distribution of tunnels at the extraction level (shown in orange in the image below), which would mean the entire design would have to be adjusted to maintain the connection between levels.
To help the company determine exactly what effect bigger LHDs would have on the existing design, their design team used a variety of integrated software options from Dassault Systèmes — starting with our parametric design tool — to analyze:
- tunnel spacing (production crosscut, draw bells, etc.)
- undercut and extraction level elevation
- offset from geology contact, east/west access tunnels, and
- the connection between levels through ore passes, ventilation raises, etc.
Why parametric design
While traditional 2D CAD-based design certainly works, it has its downsides, including the fact that, as a manual process, it takes a great deal of time because the designer must modify the entire shape of a design in response to a single change.
By using associativity to preserve the link between reference data — such as terrains and geology or resource models — and existing infrastructure models, parametric design removes or significantly reduces the need for a designer to edit the whole design in order to modify a single design parameter. The designer is able to update designs automatically (without losing previous designs) any time there is new input data because, while the inputs may have changed, the parameters of the design have not.
In addition, parametric design allows designers to:
- create and compare multiple 3D models, return to the original model and try again, or continue forward using a whole new set of parameters
- run automated simulation loops to evaluate the impact of a change, and
- test different hypotheses through scenario analysis.
Updating the original design
Using Dassault Systèmes’ parametric design tool, which enables mines to virtually create, update, and analyse a design within their own operating environment, the copper company’s designer used a number of different inputs to accommodate larger LHDs.
For example, the designer started by spacing the extraction level tunnels at 30m. The parametric design tool then automatically updated the undercut level to meet that criteria:
The red lines are the tunnels at the undercut level; the yellow lines are the tunnels at the extraction level, where the loaders must run to.
For comparison, the designer then widened the extraction level tunnels to 36m, and the tool immediately updated both the extraction and undercut level tunnels, while maintaining the same distribution of tunnels — in a matter of seconds:
After altering the tunnel spacing a few more times, the designer determined the 30m tunnel spacing was optimal and moved on to experimenting with tunnel heights and other parameters, including the offset between the tunnels and a geological structure at one end of the mine site.
The image below shows the tunnels positioned at 25m from the geological structure, shown in gray at the top:
After taking into account the most current geotechnical data, however, which indicated that this offset might not be enough for safety, the designer doubled the distance to 50m, and Parametric design again updated the whole design automatically to this:
The designer then went on to explore other parameters, including draw-bell spacing and entry angles, ore pass locations, load elevations, etc.
What comes next
The next article in this series will show how this same mine company used the Dassault Systèmes PCBC mine planning tool kit to integrate mine design with mine planning and to use automation and simulation to test those designs under real-life conditions.
The final two articles will look at how the company employed simulation to complete advanced geotechnical analyses and to evaluate thousands of production scenarios before arriving at a design for its new block caving project that would create a smaller but significantly more productive underground mine than its original mine design.
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