Browsing by Author "Rinne, Mikael|Ruiter, Hans de"

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1

Ore quality and rock mass information from drill holes in UG mining
(2011) Mohan, Arjun Gurudev
School of Engineering | Master's thesis
In order to choose and decide the regions that are worth mining, a mine planner needs to be able to model the deposit or the entire rock mass accurately, indicating where, at what depth and at what concentration the desired ore is to be excavated. This not only avoids the pointless mining of worthless rock, it also saves the mine Significant amounts time and money in resource extraction. To achieve this, there is a need to identify tools and techniques that help in the process of data gathering from the rock mass pertaining to its structural, geological and mineralogical properties that will enhance the planning, design and extraction accuracy. This thesis focuses on the new techniques that can be implemented in working UG metal mines to record and recover information from the rock mass using drill holes that have already been drilled for other standard purposes. The utilisation of information from such drill holes in structural planning; economic valuation of the minerals present, the planning of blasting methods, processing needs and many other aspects is the main objective and focus of this thesis. A main component of this thesis was a Scandinavian field trip visiting a few mines to understand their system of working and also to identify a few aspects where additional information from drill holes will be of added value in the current mining process. Different mine personnel were interviewed on what aspects they look to improve and what type of additional information they are seeking to improve the efficiency of the mine. From the visits, it is understood that there is a general need for a system or equipment that could be used to monitor and record information from the rock mass to gather information well in advance to plan the subsequent steps and stages of the mine to optimise the time and other resource utilisation. After the field trip, geophysical and MWD measurements were carried out at Pyhäsalmi mine. MWD measurements were completed with a SOLO drill machine from Sandvik and the geophysical tests were conducted by SMOY. The tests conducted at Pyhäsalmi mine were optical borehole imaging, magnetic susceptibility, natural gamma radiation and density and electrical resistivity measurement.