Many of our mining customers tell us that structural modeling is often overlooked or done in an isolated fashion by their geotechnical teams. Given digital effectiveness is now acknowledged as a top risk as well as a key enabler to success in the mining industry, many companies are now revisiting how structural modeling is done in the context of a well-honed geology team.
The most innovative of these companies are moving toward geological modeling workflows that include structural modeling integrated in a broader geology and mine planning environment, one where geology and geotechnical work is conducted in one digital environment.
Benefits
Conducting structural analysis from the same integrated modeling environment and sharing data in the same formats as the rest of the mining project brings a number of benefits including:
- Reduce the dependence on geology/mining personnel by giving both departments more of the tools they need
- Allow structural trend analysis in large and complex datasets for better mineralization characterization
- Reduce geological uncertainty, particularly in vein style deposits by integrating more available data for vein characterization
- Increase confidence in the safety of the operations by showing how rock orientations interact with the mine design
- Allow small changes to be made ahead of time
- Reduce the cost of mining by better understanding rock support needs
The new release of GEOVIA Surpac (version 6.9) introduces Structural Suite, a set of visualization and analysis tools for any kind of oriented data such as drillholes, points clouds and textured meshes. Structural Suite allows geotechnical personnel, geologists and mining engineers to apply their knowledge of structural controls and effects and extract and visualize orientations directly from drillholes. They can analyze surface gradients, and visually create planes from point clouds or textured meshes and analyze them on a stereographic projection.
Typical Structural Suite use cases include:
- Project where ore zones are going, especially when they are heavily structurally controlled
- Predict where structures will head as crews move to the next bench
- Pick actual points to create planes from specific visible structures to ensure the wanted features are mapped
- Early-stage characterization of a region and resource, whether in open cut or underground environments
- Gather the structural information at the same time as drilling occurs
- Create drainage maps, which have been created manually in the past
- Bring very valuable silo of information into the holistic modeling environment and allow validation of external standalone reports
- Draw structures directly onto photogrammetry and orthophotographs as part of your modelling process
Structural Suite helps mining operators get one step closer to a truly collaborative environment by pulling some data out of the typical geotechnical silos and making it readily available digitally to engineers and geologists.
Structural Suite is not just for large integrated mining companies. Junior operators will also beneficiate from Structural Suite by bringing some of the geotechnical data collection, analysis and reporting back in-house, as many tend to outsource based on smaller staff complements.
Finally, mining consultants will find Structural Suite useful for educating explorers and juniors about the structural data they should be collecting from early stage exploration and improve their understanding of their assets – how they should best be modeled, interpreted and ultimately mined.
Digital effectiveness in the mining industry can be approached from different perspectives, even if it is often presented as a large investment in cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, autonomous equipment, etc. You can start small and address processes that may have been digitized, but would gain by being integrated into one digital environment – making better use of the data you already own. That’s the case of structural modeling.
To learn more about Structural Suite and GEOVIA Surpac 6.9. watch the What’s New video.
Pierre Leroux
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