Abstract
In the marbel industry, ore reserves refer to the produced tonnage of orthogonal prismatic, defect-free blocks of commercial sizes and of marketable aesthetical quality. On the contrary, in the mining sector, ore reserves refer to the tonnage of ore with grade above some cut-off value. While in the mining sector ore reserves are reported according to existing standard guidelines, the marble industry has no standard method. The purpose of this paper is to present a method to estimate white marble reserves using drill coring or borehole wall logging and limited joint mapping on exposed marble surfaces. Data pertaining to fracture orientation, fracture frequency, size, and whiteness were collected. The primary phase of marble characterization is followed by the discretization of the orebody into a three-dimensional array of orthogonal prismatic blocks, where the marble whiteness and fracture intensity are attribute values. Both these variables are considered to obey continuous and not discrete probability distributions. The discretization is performed using computer aided design and the Block Kriging techniques. An outline to improve the description of a given marble ore deposit at the exploration stage is presented for the prediction of marble block size distribution from joint count measurements along diamond drill cores. An example case of a white dolomitic marble quarry is used to demonstrate these methods.
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Abbreviations
- BM:
-
Block model using the Kriging technique
- CAD:
-
Computer aided design
- CIM:
-
Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum
- CL:
-
Confidence level
- CVP:
-
Cumulative volume proportion
- DTM:
-
Digital terrain model
- FF:
-
Fracture frequency (expressed in total number of joints per metre of rock core)
- FF′:
-
Fracture frequency of each joint set (expressed in m−1)
- JORC:
-
Joint Ore Reserves Committee
- MF:
-
Modifying factors in the process of transforming resources to reserves
- NHPP:
-
Non-homogeneous poisson process
- NSD:
-
Normalized standard deviation
- pdf:
-
Probability density function
- PERC:
-
Pan-European Reserves & Resources Reporting Committee
- RR:
-
Recovery ratio
- SR:
-
Stripping ratio
- Wht:
-
Whiteness (expressed in %)
- a :
-
Normalized standard deviation of the prediction at each block of the model
- γ(h):
-
Geostatistical semi-variance function of the lag h
- f λ :
-
Number of fractures per fixed length interval along scanline or rock core (m−1)
- λ :
-
Basic linear frequency parameter of the NHPP
- \( {\sigma}_{OK}^2 \) :
-
Kriging variance at the centroid of each block in the model
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Acknowledgements
The financial support by the Programme “Marble resources estimation based on oriented drill core data (MARBLECORE)” under Contract No. AMΘΡ2-0016310 is kindly acknowledged.
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Exadaktylos, G., Saratsis, G. Methodology for the Estimation and Classification of White Marble Reserves. Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration 37, 981–994 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42461-020-00228-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42461-020-00228-3