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Unfolding Process for Reserve Evaluation of Surface Mining

Authors:
[ T. Fazlikhani ] - Mine expert of Geological Survey of Iran (GSI), Geomathics management
[ M. Dorosti ] - Mine expert of Geological Survey of Iran (GSI), Geomathics management
[ A. R. Sayyadi ] - Assistant Professor, Engineering Faculty, Mining Engineering Dept., Tarbiat Modarres University

Abstract:

Reserve estimation and related parameters are important prerequisites of any mine design procedures. Open pit limit design parameters are based on geometric and grade modeling particularly block modeling of mineral deposit. Reserve and grade evaluations in folded and faulted deposits are relatively complicated. With respect to the form of deposits, one solution to the problem is to divide the deposit into a series of smaller units each containing little or no folding. This can create various problems such as distortion of estimation space, being prone to high rate of spatial error, larger computation costs and so on. Unfolding method is a new solution for the problem. Application of this method which transforms the sample coordinates and reserve blocks into original unfolded system, allows a variogram analysis and grade interpolation to be carried out using the unfolded coordinates, followed by back transformation to the folded system for reserve evaluation and planning. In this paper, a general model for unfolding is presented and the reserve of a potash deposit is analyzed using unfolding algorithms of Gemcom software. Variography studies proved that variogram model fitting is very difficult as this deposit is strongly affected by postmineralization foldings. The unfolded process was applied during reserve estimation.

Keywords:

Modeling, Unfolding, Variography, Reserve estimation, Iljaq potash