Abstract
The Callie underground mine, located in the Tanami Desert in the Northern Territory, includes two parallel declines accessing a large orebody extending some two kilometres below the surface. One of several ideas considered in strategic mine planning is to incorporate a vertical hoisting shaft and an orepass as an alternative to trucking material to the surface along the declines. In this work, we use network optimisation techniques to investigate the feasibility of the proposed system, and to mathematically determine the optimum positions and geometry of the shaft, orepass and surrounding infrastructure. We propose a modelling procedure taking aspects from a mathematical problem, called the Fermat-Weber problem, which asks for a point minimising the sum of weighted distances to a given set of points. We describe the implementation of the procedure into a computer program for solving the problem iteratively, and present results over a range of infrastructure and haulage costs, decline gradients and life-of-mine (LOM) schedules.
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Brazil M, Rubinstein JH, Volz M (2005) The gradient-constrained Fermat-Weber problem for underground mine design. In: Caccetta L, Rehbock V (eds) Proceedings 18th national ASOR conference and eleventh australian optimisation day, pp 16–23
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Acknowledgements
We thank Newmont Australia Limited and the Australian Research Council for their joint sponsorship of this research via an ARC Linkage Grant. In particular, we thank Newmont for suggesting and formulating the Callie shaft location study. A simplified version of study was originally proposed by Steven Harvey and the detailed investigation was proposed and commissioned by Andrew Fox and Ian Suckling. I thank Robert Parr and Nadine Wetzel for their time and effort collecting and preparing data and for their constructive feedback. Further details of this work can be found in the author’s Ph.D. thesis (Volz 2008).
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© 2018 The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy
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Volz, M.G., Brazil, M., Thomas, D.A. (2018). Strategic Optimisation of a Vertical Hoisting Shaft in the Callie Underground Mine. In: Dimitrakopoulos, R. (eds) Advances in Applied Strategic Mine Planning. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69320-0_34
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69320-0_34
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