Case Histories

• 

  Uranium Mining

  Northern Saskatchewan, Canada

  Underground near Cigar Lake in Northern Saskatchewan, Canada, lies the world’s 2nd richest deposit of Uranium. The Cigar Lake ore body is located approximately 430 meters below surface and is approximately 2150 meters long with a width that ranges from 20 meters to 100 meters. Recovery of the ore presents significant technical challenges, not the least of which is its location underground in poor quality rock near a substantial body of water and its high radioactivity. Extensive testing for over a decade was required to select and validate “jet boring” as the ore recovery method.

  Numerous concrete segments which comprise the tunnel lining have been instrumented with GEOKON Vibrating Wire Embedment Strain Gages and Vibrating Wire Radial and Circumferential Pressure Cells. This instrumentation is designed to estimate the field stresses induced due to freezing so as to provide comparison to the modeled stresses. Numerous GEOKON Vibrating Wire Multiple-Position Borehole Extensometers (MPBX’s) have also been installed in critical drifts and cross-cuts to provide information for mine safety evaluations.

  Canary Systems MultiLogger Suite software was installed to manage all the instrumentation data and provide alarm monitoring and automated report and chart generation.

  For additional information, please view the Canary Systems Project Profile

• 

  Kimballton Mine

  Virginia, USA

  The field work at the Kimballton Mine in Ripplemeade, Virginia, includes NX sample coring of the roof and floor of the 15E level of the mine, USBM-method overcore stress measurements, and installation of GEOKON Multiple-Position Borehole Extensometers (MPBXs).

  An NX sample core hole was drilled through the ore zone and into the footwall to a total depth of 137.8 feet. Another NX sample core hole was drilled into the roof of the mine to a depth of 11.4 feet. The core from both core holes was logged by CMC and the core was transported back to Grand Junction, Colorado, for sample selection and strength testing.

  For more information, please visit: Agapito Associates, Inc.

  Agapito Associates, Inc. (AAI) provides consulting services in geo-engineering, mining engineering, and related disciplines. Image and project summary provided courtesy of Agapito Associates, Inc.

• 

  Morenci Mine

  Arizona, USA

  The Morenci mine covers approximately 60,000 acres and has five pits, three of which are currently active. It is the largest copper mine in North America and one of the largest in the world.

  The instrumentation program was designed to integrate data from Total Stations (TPS), dewatering well monitoring, slope monitoring using wire extensometers, MFL leaching levels, flow monitoring and two weather stations into a single database using MultiLoggerDB and MLWeb. Hardware solutions were developed and supplied to access all measurements via mine-wide communications using a high-bandwidth Mesh wireless TCP/IP network.

  All measurements (approximately 1500 data elements in total) are integrated into a single database/interface. If an alarm is triggered, the interface allows the operations personnel to quickly determine the location, cause and relevant details of the alarm.

  For additional information, please view the Canary Systems Project Profile