Define Materials

Fields can be supplied in the block model and coded to indicate areas that might be included within, or excluded from, a user-defined proportion in stopes.

For more information on how MSO uses material settings and treatments in processing, see MSO Materials.

Activity steps

Create or select an MSO scenario.
Display the Block Model screen.
Configure a Block Model
Expand the Materials command group.
Check Exclude Material options to exclude stopes if they contain more than the allowed fraction of a specified material type (for example, cemented fill, waste, or voids). Up to three exclusion criteria can be applied. For each excluded material, define:
- Attribute – A block model field that represents the material to be excluded.
- Material – The material code to be excluded.
- Default – The default value to be assumed if the chosen attribute has missing data, or an absent data value. Defaults will normally be extracted from the currently defined model, but you can set an override default value here if required.
- Allowable – The maximum allowable % of the Material within the generated stope.
Note: A material selected for exclusion cannot be selected for inclusion but can be selected again using Exclude from Report (see below).
Use Include Material to only include stopes if they contain more than a minimum fraction of the specified Material. This is often used to ensure a stope contains enough of a target ore zone.

Field parameters are the same as for Exclude Material (see above), but achieve the opposite effect.

Warning: Beware of setting a Default inclusion value to 1.0 as this requires the stope to be completely contained within the nominated code, and will not take into other included material at the stope boundaries or numeric rounding errors in the evaluation of the stope.
Use Exclusion Distance to exclude stopes if they are located within a defined distance from flagged cells (e.g., around a shaft pillar or protected zone).

Fields are the same as for previous material definitions, but with an additional Distance field.
Use Exclude from Report to allow material types to be included in the stope but excluded from the report (for example, to exclude air or mined-out areas from tonnage summaries, or voids, topography air or backfill).
A Zone Mixing field and associated values can be supplied to control mixing of material with different attributes. If a model has multiple ore types then stope-shapes are generated to not allow mixing of the ore types. No two field values from the list specified can be found in a stope.

Note: To allow some limited mixing the requirement for only one zone is relaxed providing that the dominant zone value exceeds a minimum Zone Mixing Fraction value. A minimum fraction of 1.0 would allow no mixing, and a minimum mixing fraction of 0.9 would allow the remaining coded values to have less than 0.1 of the volume of the sum of all nominated mixing codes in the stope.
1. Choose a mixing Attribute.
2. Click into the Material field (currently shows "Edit Mixing") to display the Zone Mixing Values screen.
3. Use + to supply a list of 2 or more unique material values for the selected attribute.
  
  Note: Stopes can be formed for any individual code value, but not a mixture (for example, if different lenses have different ore types then the stopeshape cannot mix the different ore types).
Summary: Zone mixing prevents the mixing of specified material types or ore zones within a single stope. The Zone Mixing Values screen is used to configure which zones can or cannot be mixed.
Optionally apply a logical filter expression to the annealed stope shapes (such as RQD >= 5.0). Shapes that do not meet the condition are discarded from results.
Save your settings.