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Mintec goes deeper into underground

Staff reporter, 5 June 2013

US-BASED mining software developer Mintec has a modest enough goal for the underground modelling space. It wants to have the only software worth considering underground. In a rather competitive little segment of the market, with some big-name incumbents, that not surprisingly wont be regarded as overly modest in some quarters. Still, Mintec is not letting a market downturn curb an aggressive product development and release program. The company was channelling more than 40 years experience into underground mine evaluation and underground mine engineering tasks, it said this week in a statement outlining the capabilities of core applications in its flagship MineSight package. MineSight Atlas allows true calendar-based scheduling of underground development activities, including stoping and backfilling. This is based on a starting date and a rate of advance in units of metres/day, tonnes/day, cubic metres/day, etc, Mintec said. MineSight 3D graphics are linked to a dynamic Gantt chart display of the calendar-based schedule. This includes assignment of resources to different activities, consideration of resource limits, and bottlenecks in the schedule. MineSight Stope will make life significantly easier for planners seeking flexibility and control in the design and conceptual-level scheduling of underground stope mining. It handles tasks such as block economic value computation, stope slicing, scheduling, and reserve reporting. Planners will enjoy a quick, easy-to-use tool for preliminary stope design, conceptual level scheduling, and sensitivity analysis. MineSight Stope generates full block stope shapes based on a minimum stope size and block economic values using the Maximum Value Neighborhood (MVN) method or the MineSight Stope Algorithm, a column composite method. According to Mintec, MineSights new Decline Design tool helps design a near optimal path from a start point to an end point with bearings that match the required constraints. It creates declines that are navigable by underground equipment, thereby satisfying both gradient and turning constraints. The Decline Design tool can also be controlled to automatically design within three-dimensional spatial constraint. This could save engineers hours of work and frustration, the developer said. MineSights new sub-block model will improve block model visualisation and accounting, Mintec said. MineSight users can represent any detailed geology clearly with each parent block able to be sub-blocked to standard child-size blocks. MineSight sub-blocking seamlessly dovetails with MineSights existing 3D block model format, MS3D visualisation, coding, interpolation and calculations. It also allows updates at any time and the ability to carry

multiple sub-blocked items in each model. Its a perfect solution where spatial representation is required for an ore percentage. Zinc-focused Trevali Mining Corporations Dayle Rusk said he thought Mintecs underground development program was definitely heading in the right direction. That niche in the industry really needs to be addressed and no other software company is addressing it, Rusk said. Justin Watson of Australian-based Xstract Mining Consultants, said the culmination of a number of separate engineering tools into a user-friendly package MineSight Atlas was a great enhancement. Mintec says MineSights 3D CAD package already makes quick work of mine design tasks such as 3D layouts of primary underground development, secondary development headings, stopes, rooms, and pillars. Blasthole rings and fans were designed with MineSights Ring Design tool, while MineSight Underground Survey tools handled underground mine progress monitoring and as-mined volumetrics and shapes. This included importing data from optical scanners. MineSights reserve calculation tools intersect the grade model of the deposit with the underground design solids to produce underground reserve estimates of partial block accuracy - with or without recovery and dilution factors. Paired with MineSight Atlas, the new sub-block model will improve block model visualisation and accounting, and will open a whole new world of activity-based scheduling for underground operations, said Glenn Wylde, Mintecs vice-president, technical. On the design side, the new Decline Design tool will speed up designs from hours to a matter of minutes. Wylde said other ancillary tools would be released to automatically build centre lines from solids, drape solid shadows to a plane, and improve workflow for raise design. HG This article was first published in www.highgrade.net. It must not be reproduced without permission of the company.