CASE STUDY

The Challenge The Result

AMC consultants have been tackling some of the most
challenging modelling and engineering problems facing
the mining industry for over thirty years. As a long-term
customer of Datamine, AMC have used their software
on hundreds of consulting projects.
One reason for AMC’s continued use of Datamine
software is because it provides the ability to implement
data modelling and engineering methodologies that
are highly specific to individual situations.
The Solution
Recently, AMC were able were able to help improve
the design and scheduling of a large underground mine
by using sparse historical data to construct a reliable
geotechnical model containing RQD and Q prime
derived values.
By incorporating the poor-quality secondary data into a
RQD model, the need gather data through extra costly
mapping and drilling was eliminated.
The model AMC generated gave the engineers a
realistic and robust geotechnical model to inform the
parameters used for stope design and ground support.
Without the model, engineers would have had much
less information and been forced to make worst-case
assumptions. This would have changed the economics
of the stopes, their planned extraction rates and the
extraction sequence.
Through imaginative use of Datamine Studio RM
processes AMC were able to convert previously
unusable qualitative data into a defensible and practical
model that represented the deposit’s rock quality.

The historical data was in the form of a database The model could be used by engineers to save time
of hand-written logs and contained no direct RQD and costs that will benefit the client over the short and
measurements. long-term

Typically, a variety of Kriging is used on the recorded READ DETAILED REPORT for more information
values to estimate the RQD values throughout the about the technical details of this project and the
deposit and use these to influence the safe design of methodology used to create the model.
stopes and determine the difficulty and timing of their
extraction. Because the historical data did not contain
direct RQD measurements the standard estimation
methodology was not automatically applicable.

Qualitative descriptions were used as a proxy to derive

discrete indicator values to represent rock quality.

A multiple indicator Kriging methodology was used

with the discrete values to estimate a model. Further
post processing based on a probabilistic approach,
including Monte Carlo simulations, was used to refine
the MIK output resulting in a defensible and practical
model that represented the deposit’s rock quality.