News

Mintec broadens underground mining software offering

Posted on 11 Jun 2013

Mintec is broadening its appeal to underground mines with the launch of new MineSight products. MineSight Atlas “allows true calendar-based scheduling of underground development activities, including stoping and backfilling.” This is based on a starting date and a rate of advance in units of metres/day, tonnes/day, or cubic meters/day. MineSight 3D graphics are linked to a dynamic Gantt chart display of the calendar-based schedule. This includes assignment of resources to different activities, consideration of resource limits, and bottlenecks in the schedule. MineSight Stope “will make life significantly easier for planners seeking flexibility and control in the design and conceptual-level scheduling of underground stope mining.”

MineSight Stope handles tasks such as block economic value computation, stope slicing, scheduling, and reserve reporting. Planners will enjoy a quick, easy-to-use tool for preliminary stope design, conceptual level scheduling, and sensitivity analysis. MineSight Stope generates full block stope shapes based on a minimum stope size and block economic values using the Maximum Value Neighborhood (MVN) method or the MineSight Stope Algorithm, a column composite method. MineSight’s new Decline Design tool helps design a near optimal path from a start point to an end point with bearings that match the required constraints. It creates declines that are navigable by underground equipment, thereby satisfying both gradient and turning constraints. The Decline Design tool can also be controlled to automatically design within three-dimensional spatial  constraint. This can save engineers hours or work and frustration.

MineSight’s new sub-block model will improve block model visualisation and accounting. MineSight users can represent anydetailed geology clearly with each parent block able to be sub-blocked to standard child-size blocks. MineSight sub-blocking seamlessly dovetails with MineSight’s existing 3D block model format, MS3D visualisation, coding, interpolation and calculations. It also allows updates at any time and the ability to carry multiple sub-blocked items in each model. “It’s a perfect solution where spatial representation is required for an ore percentage. One of the most important things to any schedule, especially underground, is ‘Does my sequencing work?’ So animation is built into Atlas, which links seamlessly with MineSight 3D. MineSight Atlas includes 3D spatial search rules so that the user can define certain activities, spatially, that have to be completed before others. Run this set of rules and Atlas automatically builds it into the Gantt model.

“Stope deals with more of the early design aspects of underground,” said Glenn Wylde, Mintec Vice President-Technical. “It will allow quick evaluation of underground mining, using block model information. The results can be used directly or as guidelines for more detailed design and evaluation. Atlas has profound implications for underground. A huge amount of work has gone into spatial constraints and dealing with the underground – the issues that are specific to underground. Atlas is very much designed to ease underground scheduling. It recognises the importance of mining sequentially underground. So, the order of activities and the sequencing of operations have to be clearly represented and easy to establish, and Atlas goes a long way to accomplishing that. Atlas was not only designed as an open-pit scheduler; it was also designed as a full-featured underground scheduler.”