Engineering & Mining Journal

JAN 2013

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MINE DESIGN package for manual scheduling and stockpile blending, while the company describes MineSight Stope as being not only a design tool, but also a very quick first-pass scheduling tool for underground engineers to look at alternatives for stope locations. Maptek Moves Off-shore Australia's Maptek released the latest version of its Vulcan geological modelling and mine planning software at the end of last year. The company noted that a customer request for generating strategic pit and dump designs led to the development of a new rapid pit design tool, which has been released in Vulcan 8.2. Mine planning engineers can quickly create mid-bench based designs, it said, as well as generating phases and reserve reports, and can evaluate multiple designs in the same amount of time previously needed for a single design. "The new tool helps engineers to quickly create and analyze different pit designs, allowing them to look at many more alternatives before producing a final design," said Steve Uecker, Maptek's Vulcan client experience manager. Maptek reports that AuruMar, the South African-based joint venture established between AngloGold Ashanti and De Beers to evaluate off-shore mineral resources, has adapted Vulcan 3-D modelling software for its exploration on 26 mining leases off-shore Nome, Alaska. Vulcan GeoModeller provides a complete set of tools for exploration and mining geologists, and can be used on both stratigraphic and non-stratigraphic deposits. The Vulcan platform allows users to do resource modelling, mine planning and reconciliation in the same environment. Hard Dollar: Counting Cash Where it Counts As noted earlier, plenty of mining companies are feeling the combined effects of soaring capex costs, upward pressures on operating costs and uncertainties over commodity markets. In a presentation given in April last year, Scottsdale, Arizona-based Hard Dollar commented that "mining companies must take measures to manage cash flow and conserve spending, while ensuring that projects stay on schedule." The company went on to point out that controlling costs and managing mining resources requires a robust tool, suggesting that its Project Cost Management (PCM) package removes common hurdles from cost controls, allowing mining companies to make project decisions that easily avoid cost overruns. While not specifically a mine design package, PCM provides a way of producing detailed, timely project status data, the company states. These data immediately show what was estimated and budgeted, versus actual project performance. Through customizable daily reports, an entire project overview is displayed, clearly showing variances and forecasts at completion. In July 2012, Hard Dollar teamed up with Canadian company CAE to include its PCM in CAE Mining's mine design, planning and scheduling software suite. "Hard Dollar's integration with the new CAE Studio 5-D Planner provides customers transparent delivery of cost and productivity throughout the entire project lifecycle," the companies said at the time, while pointing out that by integrating the two products in an industry first, they had provided users with the opportunity to merge mine design, scheduling, financial and productivity modelling for both study and operational environments. According to Hard Dollar, PCM can reduce the time it takes to build, plan, deliver and forecast cost and productivity by more than 300%, while increasing profits by 15% or more. CAE Moves Deeper into Mining A relatively recent entrant into the mine-design software market, in the past CAE has perhaps been better known world-wide for its simulator and training technology. However, the company's purchases of Datamine and Century Systems Technologies has increased its interest in the mining sector, such that it now has a dedicated business area, CAE Mining. CAE Mining supplies software tools for underground mine planning, including Mine2-4-D and its successor, CAE Studio 5-D Planner. The company's Mineable Reserves Optimizer (MRO) package determines the optimal mining envelopes within which stopes should be designed, and can be used for preliminary underground reserve estimation. The Mineable Shape Optimizer (MSO) automatically produces optimized stope designs that maximize the value of recovered ore within the given geometry and design constraints. It supports massive, sub-vertical and flat horizontal deposits and can quickly generate individual stope designs within a resource model, CAE Mining says. In terms of access design, Mine Layout Optimizer (MLO) produces optimal decline designs to satisfy access requirements and design criteria. The company suggests that this can be valuable with rapid engineering during the analysis stages of a project, as well later once designs become more detailed. Good Designs Save Time and Money Maptek Vulcan 8.2 was released to customers in November 2012. Standout features include new rapid pit design tools and improved grade estimation. 38 E&MJ; • JANUARY 2013 With so much pressure on exploration and mining companies to bring projects on stream in a cost-effective, timely manner, while working in increasingly www.e-mj.com

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