It’s Tip Tuesday! Today’s post comes from Steve Carter, our Vice President of Product Alignment. For an earlier post on using the Interactive Stope Designer, click here.

The Stope Slicer, part of the new Stope Design Tools Modules, is the new slice and dice tool introduced in GEOVIA Surpac 6.6 to slice a solid, typically one that was created using the Interactive Stope Designer, into smaller solids which represent the stopes to be mined and the optional pillars and crown pillars between stopes and sub-levels.

The Stope Slicer has a pretty complicated form to enter the inputs to slice and dice a solid. These inputs are all ultimately important when you have finally determined the locations of pillars between stopes and the elevations of sub-level boundaries. Early in the design process, before you have locked down all of the key design parameters, you can probably ignore many of these inputs. For example, you can consider accepting the default suggestions for naming the created solids because these are really only useful when creating solids that will be used by a downstream scheduling application like MineSched.

Let’s have a look at how to slice a solid with the fewest number of inputs possible so you can evaluate many design alternatives in the shortest possible time. In the early stages of evaluating design alternatives you probably haven’t even created designs for access tunnels and declines.  This means you only need to make inputs on the Slicing, Block Model and Results tabs.

The Slicing tab

1. Use the input fields on this tab to define:
2. The object to be sliced. The object must already be in a graphics layer before running the STOPE SLICER function. Selecting the object to be sliced is simple, just press the Select button. The form is hidden and you are prompted to “Select a trisolation”. Select it with the mouse and the form will be redisplayed.
3. Typically you will be slicing in levels and stopes so don’t change the Slice option.
4. Enter the From and To values to define the elevation boundaries of each sub-level. If crown pillars are to be created make sure there is a gap between the To value on a row and the From value on the next row. Surpac will recognise this gap and create crown pillar solids for you. The data entry table has some smarts so if there is a recognisable pattern to the inputs, by the time you have entered 3 rows, Surpac will figure out the pattern and all you need do is press the Tab key for additional rows, Surpac add the values for you.
5. The quickest way to define the stope boundaries is to select the Start plane and length method for the Stope method field. This requires just 4 inputs which are:

• The name of the plane group that contains the starting plane.
• The starting plane identifier.
• The Stope length – obviously this suits fixed length stopes only.
• The pillar length.

The Block Model tab

This tab is a simplified version of the block model report function. You must define:

1. The specific gravity. It’s relatively common for people to use –ve values for blocks that haven’t been explicitly assigned a rock type. To avoid errors make sure you enter a meaningful default specific value to use in case –ve values are found.
2. You can use partial percentages to improve the accuracy of the volumetric calculations.
3. If you have a number of material types make sure you select the material type attribute.
4. Finally, select all the attributes you want included in the calculations. Important inputs for the reporting attributes are:

• Contained metal factor.
  The value used here depends on the units you want for reporting contained metal. If the metal grade is grams per tonne and you want to report metal content as grams then the factor should be 1. If you want to report in kilograms, then the factor should be .001.
• Metal units.
  This is just a label for the report. If you are reporting gold in kilograms then you probably should enter a label like “(kg)”.
• Replace negatives with.
  If –ve values exist in blocks that haven’t been explicitly assigned a gold grade, make sure you use 0 (zero) as the replacement value. This will ensure correct results.

The Results tab

This is where you define the names of the graphics layers that are created for the results, the colours for the created solids and the name of the report file. Reasonable defaults are provided for all inputs except the report file name. Enter the name of the report file and soon you will have your solid sliced into a large number of smaller solids which are conveniently organised into different layers and displayed with your colour preferences.

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