Today’s post comes from Dr. Tony Diering, Dassault Systèmes GEOVIA’s Vice President of Block Caving.
Earlier this month I had the pleasure of travelling to Chile, along with Daniel Villa, one of our Principal Mining Consultants, to attend Caving 2014. Despite the current tough economic climate, the conference was well attended with approximately 200 participants enjoying 65 sessions.
The opening keynote addressed a number of industry trends and needs. Professor Gideon Chitombo from the University of Queensland emphasized the need for increased collaboration between industry, suppliers and research institutions. Herman Flores from Newcrest Mining Limited in Australia discussed future challenges and why the industry must change. With costs increasing and grades going down, some quantum changes are overdue. These two talks personified the importance of technology (including software) to assist the block caving industry in the future.
I was privileged to chair the Mine Planning Session, in which Daniel Villa presented a paper on “Mine Sequence Optimization for Block Caving using Concept of Best and Worst Case.” Throughout the presentation, Daniel discussed how the GEOVIA PCBC™ Footprint Finder tool can be used to rapidly generate a variety of mining sequences covering the range between best and worst.
Throughout the conference, I was pleased to hear many speakers refer to PCBC as the industry standard for planning cave mines. Although the main focus of the conference was around block caving, there were papers and discussions around sub-level caving, which will certainly have an increasing role in the future, especially as a lower capital cost approach to a block cave operation. There were also a few papers, which highlighted the use of Dassault Systèmes’ SIMULIA Abaqus software, which is clearly a leader for the complex stress analysis of caving operations.
Other interesting sessions were those around pre-conditioning of rock masses and automation. Pre-conditioning is a technique (using either hydraulic fracturing or explosives) to pre-condition or fracture the rock mass to facilitate the caving process. This is being seen as both a way to improve productivity for existing or new caves, and as a mechanism which would broaden the caving method to deposits previously considered inappropriate for caving. The ever-increasing use of automation in block cave mining was evident from a number of the papers as the industry strives to produce “rock factories”.
All in all, Caving 2014 was an exciting and informative conference, which demonstrates the dynamic and increasing role of cave mining in the industry.
To see more pictures from Caving 2014, check out our Facebook page.
Interested in learning more about how Dassault Systèmes GEOVIA’s applications can help you meet your caving objectives? Contact us today.
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