Assessing the Impact of Geologic Contact Dilution in Ore/Waste Classification in the Gol-Gohar Iron Ore Mine, Southeastern Iran

Abstract

Since the Gol-Gohar iron ore mine (GGIOM), which is located in southeastern Iran, is currently one of the biggest iron mines in this region, increasing the accuracy of its mineral resources model has become a challenge for geologists, metallurgists and mining engineers. Given that an accurate classification of the mining blocks into ore or waste is highly significant in strategic mine planning, three approaches for simulating the iron grades were compared against the true grades obtained from production data. The comparison was done by calculating the ratio between the total number of blocks correctly classified as ore and waste and the total number of misclassified blocks, and it was conducted for each approach in three mined benches at the GGIOM. The results reveal that the grade simulation that ignores the geological boundaries and the grade simulation based on a deterministic geological interpretation are much less accurate than the hierarchical approach, which consists of simulating both the geological boundaries and the grades.

Evaluation of mining and mineral processing methods’ impact on tantalite concentrate in Kenticha open pit mine, southern Ethiopia

“…The grade, dilution and ore loss are common issues related to mining particularly in the case of selective mining (of blocks). This will have different geological and metallurgical characteristics in terms of lithology, alteration, mineralogy, in situ metal grade(s), recoverable grade(s) and recovery ratio(s) (Masoumi et al 2020).…”

Efficient Construction of Voxel Models for Ore Bodies Using an Improved Winding Number Algorithm and CUDA Parallel Computing

“…The 3D voxel model has good geometric characteristics, with adjacent voxels and flexible particle sizes. Masoumi et al used the voxel model to simulate the mine in blocks to describe the mineral distribution with complex geometric boundaries [21]. The voxel unit can contain attribute information suitable for data analysis in 3D space.…”