1,537 research outputs found
Presidential address: Optimization in underground mine planning-developments and opportunities.
Presidential address presented at the The Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy Annual General Meeting on 11 August 2016.The application of mining-specific and generic optimization techniques in the mining industry is deeply rooted in the discipline of operations research (OR). OR has its origins in the British Royal Air Force and Army around the early 1930s. Its development continued during and after World War II. The application of OR techniques to optimization in the mining industry started to emerge in the early 1960s. Since then, optimization techniques have been applied to solve widely different mine planning problems. Mine planning plays an important role in the mine value chain as operations are measured against planned targets in order to evaluate operational performance. An optimized mine plan is expected to be sufficiently robust to ensure that actual outcomes are close or equal to planned targets, provided that variances due to poor performance are minimal. Despite the proliferation of optimization techniques in mine planning, optimization in underground mine planning is less extensively developed and applied than in open pit mine planning. This is due to the fact that optimization in underground mine planning is far more complex than open pit optimization. Optimization in underground mine planning has been executed in four broad areas, namely: development layouts, stope envelopes, production scheduling, and equipment selection and utilization. This paper highlights commonly applied optimization techniques, explores developments and opportunities, and makes a case for integrated three-dimensional (3D) stochastic optimization, in underground mine planning.MvdH201
The LBNO long-baseline oscillation sensitivities with two conventional neutrino beams at different baselines
The proposed Long Baseline Neutrino Observatory (LBNO) initially consists of
kton liquid double phase TPC complemented by a magnetised iron
calorimeter, to be installed at the Pyh\"asalmi mine, at a distance of 2300 km
from CERN. The conventional neutrino beam is produced by 400 GeV protons
accelerated at the SPS accelerator delivering 700 kW of power. The long
baseline provides a unique opportunity to study neutrino flavour oscillations
over their 1st and 2nd oscillation maxima exploring the behaviour, and
distinguishing effects arising from and matter. In this paper we
show how this comprehensive physics case can be further enhanced and
complemented if a neutrino beam produced at the Protvino IHEP accelerator
complex, at a distance of 1160 km, and with modest power of 450 kW is aimed
towards the same far detectors. We show that the coupling of two independent
sub-MW conventional neutrino and antineutrino beams at different baselines from
CERN and Protvino will allow to measure CP violation in the leptonic sector at
a confidence level of at least for 50\% of the true values of
with a 20 kton detector. With a far detector of 70 kton, the
combination allows a sensitivity for 75\% of the true values of
after 10 years of running. Running two independent neutrino
beams, each at a power below 1 MW, is more within today's state of the art than
the long-term operation of a new single high-energy multi-MW facility, which
has several technical challenges and will likely require a learning curve.Comment: 21 pages, 12 figure
Integrating materials supply in strategic mine planning of underground coal mines
In July 2005 the Australian Coal Industry’s Research Program (ACARP) commissioned Gary Gibson to identify constraints that would prevent development production rates from achieving full capacity. A “TOP 5” constraint was “The logistics of supply transport distribution and handling of roof support consumables is an issue at older extensive mines immediately while the achievement of higher development rates will compound this issue at most mines.” Then in 2020, Walker, Harvey, Baafi, Kiridena, and Porter were commissioned by ACARP to investigate Australian best practice and progress made since Gibson’s 2005 report. This report was titled: - “Benchmarking study in underground coal mining logistics.” It found that even though logistics continue to be recognised as a critical constraint across many operations particularly at a tactical / day to day level, no strategic thought had been given to logistics in underground coal mines, rather it was always assumed that logistics could keep up with any future planned design and productivity. This subsequently meant that without estimating the impact of any logistical constraint in a life of mine plan, the risk of overvaluing a mining operation is high.
This thesis attempts to rectify this shortfall and has developed a system to strategically identify logistics bottlenecks and the impacts that mine planning parameters might have on these at any point in time throughout a life of mine plan. By identifying any logistics constraints as early as possible, the best opportunity to rectify the problem at the least expense is realised. At the very worst if a logistics constraint was unsolvable then it could be understood, planned for, and reflected in the mine’s ongoing financial valuations. The system developed in this thesis, using a suite of unique algorithms, is designed to “bolt onto” existing mine plans in the XPAC mine scheduling software package, and identify at a strategic level the number of material delivery loads required to maintain planned productivity for a mining operation. Once an event was identified the system then drills down using FlexSim discrete event simulation to a tactical level to confirm the predicted impact and understand if a solution can be transferred back as a long-term solution. Most importantly the system developed in this thesis was designed to communicate to multiple non-technical stakeholders through simple graphical outputs if there is a risk to planned production levels due to a logistics constraint
Applications of simulation and optimization techniques in optimizing room and pillar mining systems
The goal of this research was to apply simulation and optimization techniques in solving mine design and production sequencing problems in room and pillar mines (R&P). The specific objectives were to: (1) apply Discrete Event Simulation (DES) to determine the optimal width of coal R&P panels under specific mining conditions; (2) investigate if the shuttle car fleet size used to mine a particular panel width is optimal in different segments of the panel; (3) test the hypothesis that binary integer linear programming (BILP) can be used to account for mining risk in R&P long range mine production sequencing; and (4) test the hypothesis that heuristic pre-processing can be used to increase the computational efficiency of branch and cut solutions to the BILP problem of R&P mine sequencing.
A DES model of an existing R&P mine was built, that is capable of evaluating the effect of variable panel width on the unit cost and productivity of the mining system. For the system and operating conditions evaluated, the result showed that a 17-entry panel is optimal. The result also showed that, for the 17-entry panel studied, four shuttle cars per continuous miner is optimal for 80% of the defined mining segments with three shuttle cars optimal for the other 20%. The research successfully incorporated risk management into the R&P production sequencing problem, modeling the problem as BILP with block aggregation to minimize computational complexity. Three pre-processing algorithms based on generating problem-specific cutting planes were developed and used to investigate whether heuristic pre-processing can increase computational efficiency. Although, in some instances, the implemented pre-processing algorithms improved computational efficiency, the overall computational times were higher due to the high cost of generating the cutting planes --Abstract, page iii
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