Geological Modelling of a Deposit and Application using Surpac

Abstract

With the help of a mine planning and design software Surpac, a geological database was created into which the coordinates and alignment of the borehole points and their constituents along with their individual grades were fed into. The deposit which has been studied is a bauxite ore. From this database, the boreholes were displayed graphically in the software GUI. Further, surface generation using the points was done that facilitated for the manual task of sectioning of individual borehole row sets. After sectioning all the hole sets, a solid model representation of the ore deposit was generated, validated and its volume and tonnage were determined with the input of its specific gravity which is known as reserve estimation. Moreover, the borehole data was composited using downhole compositing method and statistical trends of individual constituents of bauxite were studied. Block modelling was done with the help of downhole composite and the volume of the total block model was also calculated. The anomalies in the volumes between solid model and block model was discussed. The grades of individual constituents of bauxite, i.e. Al₂O₃ , Fe₂O₃, SiO₂and TiO₂ were determined for a particular block using Inverse Square Distance method (ISDM) and were found out to be 44%, 28.28%, 2.21% and 2.02% respectively. For the same block, the grade of Al₂O₃ was determined using three different grade measurement techniques, i.e. Nearest Neighbour, ISDM and Ordinary Kriging and were found out to be 41.4%, 44% and 41.37% respectively. The grades were compared to proper reasoning and concluded accordingly.