The paper discusses the issues of ventilating in deep quarries caused by the intensification of blasting operations at great depths, the increased distance of ore truck transportation to the daylight area, constant change in the geometrical parameters of the quarry, its microrelief and direction of mining, and increased isolation of the mined space from the environment. We provide a brief analysis of the current tools for forced airflow in deep quarries, which showed that the use of forced ventilation is often challenging since it leads to high energy consumption, high level of noise exceeding the permissible parameters, and high speeds of forced air flows may blow the dust off the quarry surfaces. The article presents methods and tools developed at the Siberian Federal University for intensifying the natural airflow in deep quarries by changing the air density at the entrance and exit points of the pit, as well as heating the shady areas using mirrors and solar energy, which do not interfere with mining and blasting operations.
In Russia development of mineral resources is carried out on a truly grand scale, and mining industry is in its essence a basic sector, supporting and facilitating the development of national economy. It predetermines the need of safe and responsible attitude towards riches of our subsoil – mineral resources. With this in mind, one of the key requirements to extraction technologies is minimization of mining losses and ore dilution. The biggest ore losses in the mining block take place in the process of development of contact areas between the ore body and surrounding rocks, due to differences between development pattern and surface of geological contact. Complexity of the contact between ore and surrounding rocks is traditionally characterized by so called «stochastic contact zone». Technological difficulty of extracting ore from the ore – wallrock contact is determined by volatility of geometric parameters in «stochastic contact zone» in the plane of geological contact. Current paper focuses on the issues of standard-setting for mining losses and ore dilution in the process of near-contact zone development. A method is suggested to estimate standard values of losses and ore dilution in stochastic zones. Authors have developed an algorithm of defining the shape of the contact. In the stochastic zone the contact can have a rectangular, sinusoidal, serrate and straight-line shapes. Research has established a relation between the contact shape and amounts of mining losses and ore dilution, formulas to calculate standard values are presented. Using suggested method, standard values for contact ore losses can be obtained in a quicker and more reliable way.
