MinePlan presents a new tool from the MinePlan Grade Control Geo suite, within the HxGN MinePlan Axis product: the Digblock Optimizer (DBO)!
Quality control (Grade Control) is essential to ensure success in the short term, detailing materials and their respective destinations to achieve the production target. Poor Grade Control practices result in improper or inadequate optimization of your cut design. Which causes a lot of dilution or even erroneous classification as to which destination will proceed.
MPAxis-DBO generates economically optimized cuts for the quality control of your mine.
In several open pit mine operations, we use fire plan and mining front release polygons as a starting point for quality control. We manipulate these generated cuts to meet specific needs based on economic factors, deposit geometry and mine equipment.
Figure 1 – Fire plane polygons.
Deposit economic analyzes are very important for mining operations to maximize their profits. Current practice for generating slices involves manually digitizing polygons based on the block model. This interpretation can vary greatly, being sometimes very conservative and sometimes very optimistic, depending on the quality controller.
However, this variation can directly affect the economic viability of the mined material. This is when the Digblock Optimizer tool (DBO) acts directly by removing this factor/influence inherent to each person.
Figure 2 – User-interpreted, digitized cut to separate material based on cutoff.
Considering practices in mining operations, optimized cutting polygons generally differ from the mined material, requiring adjustments in some cases.
For quality control to have a comparison based on optimized cuts to generate the operational cut. AND It is essential not to make allocation mistakes so as not to dilute the material too much, especially if there are different processes for a certain type of material.
The tool Digblock Optimizer (DBO), designed mainly for quality control (Grade Control), must be implemented immediately after the design of the fire plan. However, you can also use it to create short and medium term plans, generating bank-by-bank and phase-by-phase cuts.
How does the DIGBLOCK OPTIMIZER tool work?
The tool works by assigning a digitized polygon or selective mining unit (SMU) to the block model. The SMU represents the smallest geometry that site equipment can mine. The cells within the SMU are evaluated as groups and thus decide which is the most economically viable destination/route, for example: ROM or Waste Dump.
The DBO tool requires three main components:
- Calculation of Net Smelter Return (NSR) which will help determine the NSR value for the block. The NSR is the resale value (total resale minus associated production costs) that the sale of the product generated by the mine receives, minus transportation and refining costs.
- Block/SMU NSR value helps determine the correct material to mine for the entire SMU, the that minimizes the loss of profit.
- Material type which will ultimately decide the destination and route for the mined material.
Figure 3 – MPAxis Process Manager: interface showing a minimum configuration for the DBO.
The configuration step of the Digblock Optimizer (BOD) requires the input of several parameters, such as the fire plane polygon, block model, and MPTorque or MPCompass holes.
During the calculation stage in the model, we perform three main calculations:
- Calculation of NSR;
- Calculation of destination of types of materials;
- Resale calculation for the block model.
This interface also allows you to control the current cost of the commodity through variables.
In the final stage, we operate the Digblock Optimizer. We configure the SMU and correlate the variables calculated in the previous steps. After the process is complete, we store the optimized polygons from the cuts in MinePlan geometric objects.
Figure 4 – DBO polygons generated and saved in geometric objects.
The tool Digblock Optimizer (BOD) It's part of the MPAxis package! If you would like more information, we are available to provide it.
As an alternative to the previous minimal routine, this tool can be incorporated into a broader context which completes short-term routines and quality control on your site:
Figure 5 – MPAxis Process Manager: interface showing a quality control case study (Grade Control) with routines to update the model and incorporating DBO as a final step.
Once you have the optimized cut polygons from Digblock Optimizer (DBO), you can import them into MinePlan Planner. There, it is possible to assign, manipulate and export these polygons according to mining operation practices.
In the example below, we show an MPPlanner configuration that uses the optimized polygons from the Digblock Optimizer (DBO) and the manual polygons based on these optimized ones to generate short-term operational plans.
Figure 6 – MPPlanner project containing the DBO polygons and manuals.
Figure 7 – Above, manual polygons. Below, DBO optimized polygons.
THE Hexagon Mining | MinePlan maintains a commitment to the continuous development and improvements of this tool and, in the near future, you will also be able to count on:
- Directional mining controls - wom This option takes into account the local mining direction, which is very important for deposits where equipment allows strip cuts to be mined.
- Different optimization algorithms – like the many algorithms used to generate the optimized cuts in BOD, more functionalities will be included to redefine the calculations according to your mine.
- Optimized cutting geometry control – the functionality to create more operational cuts that will reduce geometry manipulation time.
For any information about the MPAxis tool Digblock Optimizer (BOD) contact! It will be a pleasure to chat about the news to speed up your short-term and quality control activities!
To the next!!!
