Artículo de revista
Direct block-support simulation of grades in multi-element deposits: application to recoverable mineral resource estimation at Sungun porphyry copper-molybdenum deposit
Fecha
2017Registro en:
J. S. Afr. Inst. Min. Metall. vol.117 n.6 Jun. 2017
Autor
Hosseini, S. A.
Asghari, O.
Emery, Xavier
Institución
Resumen
Recoverable mineral resources assessment has become a standard
geostatistical application in the mining industry, with various geostatistical
techniques currently available. This investigation aimed to improve the
prediction at the Sungun deposit and to obtain mineral resource models
capable of handling (i) the change of support from drill-hole composites to
selective mining units (SMUs), (ii) the multivariate nature of the ore
control selection criteria that involves both copper and molybdenum grades;
and (iii) the local uncertainty on the true (unknown) grades. The solution
presented in this paper is to use direct block-support sequential
cosimulation in order to construct a set of alternative outcomes of the
copper and molybdenum grades on block support over the deposit, with no
need for storing point-support values, hence with a considerable gain in
memory management and CPU time. The grade realizations so obtained are
then processed to calculate the uncertainty in the mineral resources that
can be recovered above given cut-off grades, both globally and on a blockby-
block basis.