ITASCA Software services

Combining experience, conventional approaches, and numerical modeling tools, Itasca can simulate mining of client’s sites first, to select mining methods appropriate to the orebody geometry, rock mass strength conditions, and stress state. Itasca understands the economics involved in any mine design and ensures that mineral recovery is optimized while satisfying subsidence criteria and providing a productive, stable, and safe mining method.

Itasca has developed unique and robust approaches to pillar design that recognizes the importance of understanding the rock behavior from intact rock and bedding to joints and faults. Itasca’s software can model the stress-strain response of continuous, blocky, or bedded materials exhibiting plastic, brittle, or creep behaviors. Consequently, any combination of lithology comprising the pillar-floor-roof system can be analyzed. This includes reproducing the complex combination of pillar sloughing (rib rash) and floor heave experienced at different extraction levels and vertical stress levels throughout a mine.

Itasca offers services in backfill characterization, specification, design of mixing and delivery systems, stability analysis (exposure stability, reinforcement and closure resistance), dynamic modeling to examine stability and liquefaction potential under rockburst and rockfall conditions, and instrumentation and testing of placed backfill. These services cover a wide range of backfill products (paste fills, hydraulic fill, cemented aggregate fill, and rockfill) and have been applied to mining operations throughout the world. Itasca also has developed specialized methods for simulation of the deformation and yielding of backfill, bulkheads, and backfill mats.

Surface subsidence (vertical deformations) or mining-induced ground deformations (horizontal and vertical) are often an inevitable consequence of many mining methods. Itasca evaluates mining-induced subsidence related to the extraction of ore from both underground and open pit mines, together with dewatering-induced subsidence. Services provided include: field investigation for acquiring geomechanical and hydrogeological properties; subsidence back-analysis; and prediction of the magnitude and extent of subsidence related to a particular mine design in order to optimize location of infrastructure and understand any impacts on existing property and the surface environment.

Itasca designs the ground support layout and specification necessary to reinforce, retain, and hold the rock mass around excavations. The required level of ground support can be determined from an understanding of the rock mass strength, the initial (in-situ) stresses, and the stresses (magnitude and orientation) likely to change over time. By considering the evolution in induced stress over time, it can be possible to identify specific areas around the mine where there may be a need for heavier support or secondary support.