The evaluation of haulage truck size effects on open pit mining

This thesis investigates the effects of equipment size selection on the economics of open pit mining. The work presented, illustrates the importance of considering equipment selection in the wider context of the entire mine. A methodology is presented for evaluating the various variables that are affected by equipment size, Equipment Size Sensitive Variables, (ESSV) that will aid the industry in making more effective equipment selection decisions. Initially, the thesis explores, classifies and discusses ESSVs. The importance of these variables and identified interrelationships are highlighted through mathematical and discrete event simulation methods. The research uses a set of case studies to show that the influence of the ESSV extends beyond the central mine production to encompass the mill, environment and community. The work reveals that some ESSVs such as reliability, tire cost and productivity are related to the current equipment technology therefore their effects are comparable for different mines, while other ESSVs are related to the mine and deposit characteristics, therefore their effects vary from mine to mine. Through the synthesis and enhancement of existing work this thesis develops techniques for the economic evaluation of equipment size and shows that the use of larger equipment has significant cost effects for some mines on other areas of the operation such as the mill. The techniques developed for ESSV evaluation include integration of orebody modeling, mine design, mill performance prediction, equipment production and maintenance costs. As typical of many research products the results show the need and importance for further work to enhance the knowledge developed about ESSV and the effect of scale on the mining industry.Applied Science, Faculty ofMining Engineering, Keevil Institute ofGraduat

Field-trial demonstration of cost efficient sub-wavelength service through integrated packet/circuit hybrid network [Invited]

Carriers are under constant pressure to meet the ever-increasing bandwidth demand while reducing cost per bit, enhancing network throughput, and offering a large variety of services. Hybrid packet and circuit network technologies are being widely investigated and considered as a solution for offering both the high network throughput of the packet domain and wavelength services, i.e., a low fixed latency and zero packet loss. To enable carriers to serve a higher number of customers requiring wavelength services, optical transport network (OTN)- based sub-wavelength switching is adopted to support finer granularity with similar performance to full wavelength services. However, OTN is not able to perform statistical multiplexing and achieve the throughput efficiency of packet networks. In this work an integrated hybrid optical network field-trial is described to demonstrate the ability to both aggregate and transport sub-wavelength circuits, and offer high throughput efficiency by statistically multiplexing traffic on transport wavelengths. Results show the transport of sub-wavelength services with packet-delay variation limited to only 15 ns and 82.4% wavelength utilization using statistical multiplexing