Overview

Designing an open pit is an iterative process involving consideration of many design criteria, constraints and objectives. There is no single way to design a pit - every engineer does it slightly differently. Our objective in this tutorial is to show in detail how to use the various design tools in Studio to create a detailed pit design using three different methods.

The design process, naturally, starts from a geological resource or ore reserve which is defined by a block model. In this tutorial you will use installed tutorial data, including a simple geological model from which phase information will be derived.

Tutorial Requirements

This tutorial requires access to a licensed copy of Studio OP v2.2 or later. For information about getting a copy of the latest Studio OP version, please contact your local Datamine representative.
You will need access to the "DmTutorials" data set found under C:\Database.
You have approximately 30 minutes available to complete the tutorial.

In this tutorial you will learn how to:

Import and view the ultimate pit shell from a pit optimization program
Load and view the orebody model, terrain model and other design data
Create design strings, contours, berms, switchbacks and road definitions, manually and automatically
Update a phase DTM with designed pit infrastructure
Add an adaptive and fixed road, including box cut and embankments

Generally, the pit design process in Studio OP follows the following logic:

Pit Optimization

Optimization of the planning model and pit rim generation are managed by external software. You would normally use a pit optimization program like NPV Scheduler to determine the economic limits to the pit design. NPV Scheduler comes with a comprehensive set of tutorials of its own.

If you do wish to generate your own ultimate pit shell with NPV Scheduler, just import the block model file _vb_mod1.dm from the "DmTutorials" database to your NPV Scheduler project directory and follow the procedure explained in the NPV Scheduler tutorial. To save you time, this has already been completed and the results of the optimization are contained in the following database files:

_vb_npvmod1	block model containing only blocks lying within the ultimate pit with fields VALUE - the profit generated from mining each block PHASE - defines a series of pits based on successive reductions in profit values SEQUENCE - the recommended order in which blocks should be mined to maximize the Net Present Value of the pit
_vb_npvsurftr and _vb_npvsurfpt	wireframe of the ultimate pit surface

The Sample files listed can all be found in the C:\Database\DMTutorials\Data\VBOP\Datamine directory:

The pit optimization was generated using the following design parameters:

Face Angle	60 degrees	Rock Density	2.5 t/m3
Road Width	20 meters	Mining Cost	0.95 $/t
Road Gradient	1:10 (10%)	Processing Cost	3.63 $/t
Berm Width	8 meters	Gold Price	11.25 $/g
Bench Height	20 meters	Copper Price	2094 $/t
Ultimate Pit Slope	30 degrees

cashflow.bmp (475542 bytes)

The remaining items fall within the scope of Studio OP's automated pit design tools, and will be covered in this tutorial.

Throughout these exercises, you will access a wide range of editing commands.

Data is progressed throughout the tutorial so all exercises should be completed in order.