A Geostatistical study of the copper orebody within the Phalaborwa complex
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Date
2015-03-11
Authors
Finch, Adrian Patrick
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Abstract
This Report makes a geo-statistics comparison between
Benches 10 and 20 of the Palaborwa open pit and presents
a suite of geo-statistics programmes developed for the
Sinclair Spectrum personal computer.
It has always been assumed for planning and grade
control purposes, that values in one bench can be
extrapolated into the bench below and this is an attempt
to validate the assumption.
Assays are done on drill chip samples from every
blastnole drilled in copper bearing composites; the
values are then recorded by position on 1:500 scale
Bench Plans. These data are regularised by averaging
values within 10m x 10m blocks which are then used in
the geo-statistics analysis. A three parameter
lognormal model was used to represent the distribution;
the two benches were compared with each other in the
analysis through to Kriging of each central area.
Although the benches were found not to have the same
distribution there is a high degree of similarity and
the use of geo-statistics would improve the accuracy of
grade predictions.