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Abstract

With decreasing profits, optimising the size of stopes to minimise dilution is a step towards achieving a productive and profitable mining operation. The stability graph was developed for the determination of stope sizes in wide orebodies to control dilution in bulk mining. Unfortunately, this graph is qualitative and stopes can only be described as stable, unstable or cave. The equivalent linear overbreak slough stability graph is quantitative but only gives average depths of failure. The graph is also only applicable to narrow vein orebodies. This paper presents a generalised quantitative dilution-based stability graph independent of orebody width. Data were collected from six underground metalliferous mines across Australia and statistically analysed using logistic regression and the Bayesian likelihood discrimination methods. The graphs provide the mining engineer the flexibility to design open stope sizes based on acceptable dilution to a given operation. More data could improve the reliability of the graphs.

Keywords

Generalised stability graph dilution based open stope design orebody size independent statistics

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Development of a generalised dilution-based stability graph for open stope design

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