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Characterization of rock masses is one of the fundamental aspects of rock engineering. Particularly, as a rock mass characteristic, determination of the strength of jointed rock masses is difficult since the size of representative specimens including discontinuities is too large for laboratory testing. This problem can be overcome by using the Hoek– Brown empirical failure criterion in conjunction with the Geological Strength Index (GSI) classification system. However, characterization of rock masses and determi...

Mine ventilation has a key role to improving underground working conditions. Ventilation is required to clear dust, gas and toxic fumes from blasting and removing exhaust fumes from diesel equipments and also required for cooling the workplace for miners in deep hot mines. Ventilation systems need to take many possible modern mining scenarios into account, and costly infrastructure is needed to serve future ventilation and cooling requirements. To enable the practical and economical design of mine ventilation syst...

Since long term production scheduling deals with movement of ore and waste during the life of a mine, it has a significant effect on the cash flow of a mining operation. Therefore, mine planners often seek to optimize the production schedule with respect to a given criterion. The most commonly used criterion in long term scheduling optimization is to maximize net present value (NPV). The process involves sequencing of ore blocks or parcels to be mined in each period over the life of the mine subject to precedence ...

The optimum pit limit design can be defined as determining the ultimate or final mining limits of ore deposit with maximum value or profit which is obtained from its extraction. Heuristic optimization techniques have been one set of the most widely used methods for ultimate pit limit analysis because of their rapid execution speed and easy conceptualization. This paper considers a heuristic technique, known as 3D moving cone to find the optimum pit limit of Sangan iron ore deposit in Iran. To evaluate the results ...