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MINE DEVELOPMENT JUNE 2016 • E&MJ; 67 www.e-mj.com Ward also noted that various geotech- nical issues encountered during under- ground construction forced the teams to rethink where most of the new raises would be located. "Anytime they hit bad ground, the teams quickly analyzed the problems, reviewed alternative areas, reconfgured airfow models, and imple- mented solutions to keep the project on track," he said, adding that at the end, despite all the hurdles, the work was ac- tually completed ahead of schedule. Upon the reversal of airfow, work at Leeville had to be temporarily suspended long enough for dust to subside and for ground conditions to be inspected (due to the sudden change from warm, moist air to cold, dry air in some parts of the mine). That transition process went smoothly enough for Leeville to return to normal operation in less than two days. Doing More With Less No one is predicting a rapid recovery from the industry's slump. The consen- sus is that markets, capital and investor interest will only gradually strengthen in the years ahead—and it's likely that the current focus on cost containment and capital conservation will endure, at least until clear indications of the next boom emerge. Under these circumstances, it's also likely that mining executives, manag- ers, engineers and project personnel will be looking for ways to do more with less. In the matter of mine development, this could mean fnding software solutions that provide a clearer, bigger picture of the mine design process; choosing meth- ods and equipment that require fewer workers underground; and adopting tech- nologies that reduce the scope and costs of underground infrastructure. Mine planning and development re- quires software solutions that offer ef- fective design, data collection and de- cision-making tools. Among the most well-known of these all-in-one packages is Geovia Surpac. Geovia said the most recent release of Surpac is structured to seamlessly link together design, sche- duling and analysis to give engineers more control over mine development and economic return. The underground development tools in Surpac offer fea- tures such as: • Automation that is built into design and scheduling, freeing engineers from re- petitive tasks. • Elimination of manual import and ex- port of data, reducing the possibility of potential errors. • Development precedence logic that is built into designs, which are then auto- matically read and understood by the scheduling component. • Schedule analysis capability that allows users to interrogate and supplement the data used in development schedules. • Effcient monitoring of changing ground conditions in underground cavities with the Mesh Tools module. • An interactive Stope Designer tool, which steps through planes to delineate practical stope boundaries; and a Stope Slicer tool that divides solids into practical mining shapes. The growing interest in block cav- ing also has made Geovia's PCBC block caving design tool popular throughout the industry, offering users the benefts that come with decision-making based on a single source of data housed in a central database; these include spending less time updating mine plans, evaluat- ing scheduling options and running prof- itability scenarios. The PCBC package comprises a standard block cave sched- uler module, which can be supplemented with several other modules. Geovia isn't the only major player to offer a sophisticated solution to caving layout and design: Queensland, Austra- lia-based Deswik has released a new cave fow modeling tool, called Deswik.Caving, which integrates with the main software suite and simulates cave fow for the life-of-mine of a caving operation for several outcomes such as recovery, di- lution and production scheduling. Us- ers can create multiple caving scenarios with different ring sizes, schedules and fow characteristics. The caving scenario prepares a block model and schedules production for a fow simulation. Deswik. Caving is claimed to be suitable for use in all caving environments, including block caving, sublevel caving and in- cline caving. According to the company, it's based on the PGCA cellular auto- mata model developed by Gavin Power, a recognized geotechnical engineer in the caving industry. Deswik also launched a new survey functionality for underground mining as part of its latest software-suite update, Deswik.Suite 2016.1. With seamless in- tegration to Leica instruments, Deswik. CAD now features in-built survey func- tions commonly used by underground surveyors internationally. The new func- tionality includes survey job manage- ment, in-built stations database, attribute values varying along polylines as well as advanced features such as automatic sol- ids creation from tunnel as-builts. These allow for dynamic data updating and rap- id plot generation. Cutting Ventilation Costs Ventilation is vital to underground oper- ations—and expensive, in terms of both underground excavation costs for raises and shafts, and in energy usage. Tradi- tionally, underground mobile equipment in the mining sector has relied on emis- sions-producing diesel engines, which The recently completed Turf No. 3 ventilation shaft at Newmont's Leeville mine doubles the mine's ventilation capacity and enables future underground exploration north of current operations. (Photo: Newmont Mining)