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Diaz Villena, Eduardo Ernesto

University of British Columbia

The traditional approach to evaluating the metallurgical behaviour of different types of rocks considers testing samples under conventional methodologies. Results become the key parameters for geometallurgical modelling and plant design optimization. The costs of testing, the involved times, and the quantity of required samples are the main limitations to increasing the volume of data, impacting the decision-making process and consequently increasing uncertainty. The more challenging conditions of current mining projects have pushed the industry to develop alternatives to increase orebody knowledge. It has been identified that advanced core logging is fundamental to having a better understanding of the orebody. Based on the above, the purpose of the current research is to develop a methodology to generate support data for the geometallurgical modelling of grindability indexes and to evaluate if predictive models can be proposed by using a full-scale prototype of the novel Minpraxis Tester (MPT), which is able to characterize the strength of the rock along drill cores. Core logging is performed on full drill cores to identify geological features present in the samples and to establish geometallurgical groups. MPT of half cores and lump rocks and conventional grindability tests are performed on each group. Finally, a methodology is developed to manage the MPT results and compare them with conventional grindability measurements. Results show that MPT responses could be successfully correlated with the drop weight index as well as the Bond work index when testing half cores and lump rocks allowing nomination of potential proxies, and generating predictive models based on simple linear regressions that can predict the grindability indexes with no bias within ±15% and ±20% of error, respectively. It was also identified that the MPT responses depends on the geological conditions of the samples (microfractures and veins status), so accurate core logging is required to analyze results. This work shows that by using the MPT, there is an opportunity to produce data to support the geometallurgical modelling of grindability indexes and the grinding operation parameters by taking advantage of samples not usually considered for geometallurgical testing (e.g., resource drill cores and blast hole cuttings).

Text

2024-04-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84259

Mining Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/