Exploitation
F. Sotoudeh; M. Ataei; R. Kakaie; Y. Pourrahimian
Abstract
In mining projects, all uncertainties associated with a project must be considered to determine the feasibility study. Grade uncertainty is one of the major components of technical uncertainty that affects the variability of the project. Geostatistical simulation, as a reliable approach, is the most ...
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In mining projects, all uncertainties associated with a project must be considered to determine the feasibility study. Grade uncertainty is one of the major components of technical uncertainty that affects the variability of the project. Geostatistical simulation, as a reliable approach, is the most widely used method to quantify risk analysis to overcome the drawbacks of the estimation methods used for an entire ore body. In this work, all the algorithms developed by numerous researchers for optimization of the underground stope layout are reviewed. After that, a computer program called stope layout optimizer 3D is developed based on a previously proposed heuristic algorithm in order to incorporate the influence of grade variability in the final stope layout. Utilizing the sequential gaussian conditional simulation, 50 simulations and a kriging model are constructed for an underground copper vein deposit situated in the southwest of Iran, and the final stope layout is carried out separately. It can be observed that geostatistical simulation can effectively cope with the weakness of the kriging model. The final results obtained show that the frequency of economic value for all realizations varies between 6.7 M$ and 30.7 M$. This range of variation helps designers to make a better and lower risk decision under different conditions.
Exploitation
S. Maleki; F. Sotoudeh; F. Sereshki
Abstract
Ventilation is a vital component of an underground mining operation, used to guarantee a safe atmosphere for workers and survive them from the hazardous and toxic gases. In the recent years, engineers have begun to apply new operation research techniques in order to optimize the ventilation systems to ...
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Ventilation is a vital component of an underground mining operation, used to guarantee a safe atmosphere for workers and survive them from the hazardous and toxic gases. In the recent years, engineers have begun to apply new operation research techniques in order to optimize the ventilation systems to assist in achieving a regulatory compliance, reduce ventilation costs, and improve its efficiency. Airflow regulation optimization in mine ventilation networks is described as a minimization model whose objective function is a minimum number of regulators and energy consumption. In this work, all the previously accomplished works were first reviewed. Then a ventilation system was designed for the Western-Razmja coal mine by a manual method, and an axial fan was proposed. Subsequently, the same ventilation system was simulated using the VENTSIM 3D software. The results obtained by computer simulation showed that there was a reliable relation between the manual method and the simulation approach. In the final step, the GAMS software was used to solve a Mathematical Programming (MP) problem to minimize the overall cost of ventilation by determination of the optimum location for the fan and regulators. The final results of this work illustrated that not only the number of regulators were reduced through solving the MP model but also the total resistance of the Western-Razmja coal mine was reduced by 14% from 1.6 to 1.3. Furthermore, it was observed that the total efficiency of the proposed fan was increased.
