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An overview of rock support design
Published in E. Hoek, P.K. Kaiser, W. Rbawden, Support of Underground Excavations in Hard Rock, 2000
E. Hoek, P.K. Kaiser, W. Rbawden
The composition and nature of the orebody and the surrounding host rock, the in situ stresses and the geometry and excavation sequence of the stopes, all have an influence upon the overall stability of the mine. Mining stopes in the incorrect sequence, leaving pillars of inadequate size between stopes, incorrectly locating shafts and orepasses, in areas which are likely to be subjected to major stress changes, are all problems which have to be dealt with by considering the overall geometry of the mine.
Underground mining/stoping methods & mine closure
Published in Ratan Raj Tatiya, Surface and Underground Excavations, 2013
Stope is an ore block of proper size prepared out of a deposit to be mined, for the purpose of final exploitation of the orebody enclosed within it. Before stoping operations can be started, the stope needs to be developed or prepared. This task is often termed as stope preparation and the process of winning ore from a stope so prepared, by way of ore fragmentation and its handling, is known as stoping.
Underground hard rock (metal/non-metal) mining
Published in A.J.S. (Sam) Spearing, Liqiang Ma, Cong-An Ma, Mine Design, Planning and Sustainable Exploitation in the Digital Age, 2023
A.J.S. (Sam) Spearing, Liqiang Ma, Cong-An Ma
A stope is an underground excavation where the actual ore is produced. Development of stopes in massive mining methods often starts from blasting a slot, which is a steeply dipping excavation at one boundary of the planned orebody stope. Mining then continues by blasting rings or slices of the orebody into the slot.
Life-of-mine optimization for integrated open stope development and production scheduling using a mixed-integer linear programming framework
Published in Mining Technology, 2023
Emmanuel John Andrew Appianing, Eugene Ben-Awuah, Yashar Pourrahimian
This research aims at undertaking a long-term production scheduling optimization process to maximize the profit from an underground mining operation. The objective function maximizes the NPV of the underground mining project while satisfying all operational constraints. These constraints control development requirements (capital and operational), mining and processing capacities, grade blending and reserve requirements, stoping sequence precedence relationships, and non-negativity of decision variables. The concepts presented in Afum et al. (2020), Afum (2021), Huang et al. (2020), and Huang and Ben-Awuah (2018) were used as the starting point of this development. The MILP framework has been modelled using Equations (1) to (54). The explanations of the nomenclature used in modelling the equations are provided in the Appendix at the end of this paper. The profit from mining a stope depends on the value of the stope and the costs incurred in extraction, processing, capital development, ventilation development, operational development, ore pass development and backfilling. Hence, the discounted profit from mining stope is equal to the discounted revenue generated by selling the final product contained in stope minus all the discounted costs involved in extracting stope . This is represented by Equations (1) to (8).
Stochastic stope design optimisation under grade uncertainty and dynamic development costs
Published in International Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environment, 2022
Matheus Furtado e Faria, Roussos Dimitrakopoulos, Cláudio Pinto
The economic value of a stope , in turn, is determined by the sum of the economic values of all its blocks and could also consider its horizontal distance from each access option. Note that Eq. 3 assigns higher costs for larger stopes. Considering a family of potential stopes that share a common high-grade block, the larger stopes centred in this block are likely to have more-low grade and waste blocks, resulting in a reduced value . Hence, the optimisation process would opt for a smaller stope containing this high-grade block. As a result, even though the current decision variables are in stope support scale, the family of potential stopes that share this high-grade block carries the information on a block basis, and consequently, the optimisation process is able to select the better stope locations and sizes in order to control dilution.
Integrated underground mining and pre-concentration systems; a critical review of technical concepts and developments
Published in International Journal of Mining, Reclamation and Environment, 2021
Farzad Sotoudeh, Micah Nehring, Mehmet Kizil, Peter Knights
Sublevel stoping is one of the most common and large scale mining methods, which can be implemented in tabular and steeply dipping orebodies by creating large open stopes in a vertical direction. This method is appropriate for deposits with competent ore and host rock [57]. The ore is broken by drilling and blasting in sublevels within stopes, and the fragmented ore is mucked from drawpoints using LHDs. The sequence and extraction of stopes is a critical issue in this method which requires precise planning and design over the mine life. This is due to the consideration of stability in adjacent stopes and fillmasses [58]. Dilution in this mining method can be high in irregular deposits particularly where the rock in the wall is less competent. Even though the most important benefits of this method are high productivity and efficiency, lower costs and reasonably high recovery, a high level of dilution in inauspicious conditions can occur.