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Block cave mine infrastructure reliability applied to production planning

University of British Columbia

The production promise of a mine should reflect the fundamental models that sustain the mining system. Commonly this promise is formalized by the production schedule of a mine which is a bankable document that supports the decision of whether or not to pursue (or continue to pursue) the mining venture. Currently there are several computer based applications that enable mining engineers to compute a production schedule for a block cave operation. However, several operational upsets such as hang ups, oversize material, wet muck and rock instability affect the availability of mining infrastructure jeopardizing the original production estimates. These upsets can be related to geotechnical properties and caving processes in the rock mass. The current schedulers do not incorporate or account for geotechnical properties and caving processes. Thus, they often overestimate the production capacity of the mine. In this dissertation, a methodology has been devised for using observations of the failure frequency of mining infrastructure such as draw points, production drifts and ore passes to assess the reliability of this infrastructure to sustain a given production schedule. The novel aspect of measuring draw point reliability in this way is that it effectively subsumes complex geotechnical phenomena that lead to draw point failure such as geological conditions, stress concentration, or coarse fragmentation. The research found that the rate of occurrence of failure of a draw point can be characterized by a "bathtub curve" whose shape changes with the geotechnical characteristics of the rock mass, mining system and stress regime. The final phase of the research integrated the estimated mining infrastructure reliability into production scheduling through a reliability model. This integrated model provided the ability to generate from a number of draw points, a production plan in which a subset of the draw points will yield the requested tonnage with an associated degree of reliability based on the reliability of individual components of the mining infrastructure. Validation of the reliability model demonstrated that it does reproduce the tonnage distribution curve and consequently estimates the technical uncertainty of a production schedule related to mining infrastructure availability.

Text

2010-01-16

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/18408

Mining Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

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