Geological modeling of rock type domains in the Balya (Turkey) lead-zinc deposit using plurigaussian simulation

Abstract

Mineral resource evaluation requires defining geological rock-type domains. The traditional simulation methods have serious limitations for applications to large numbers of domains, which have complex contact relations. Plurigaussian simulation is an effective method which can be applied, in a simple way, to any number of domains, using both local and global geological information to infer the distributions of rock types. This work not only presents the application of the plurigaussian simulation method to the Balya lead-zinc deposit, but also assesses the spatially varying rock type proportions, and accounts for uncertainties between them. These parameters are extremely important for mining deposits, since the mineralizations of interest generally occur only in certain rock types. Furthermore, being able to model the different geological rock types is vital to good mine operations, production planning, and management. The results indicate that the plurigaussian method correctly reproduces the different orientations of the individual rock types, as seen in drill holes, and the proportion of each rock type, even if this varies in space.

Stochastic rock type modeling in a porphyry copper deposit and its application to copper grade evaluation

“…The pros and cons of these models have been discussed in the literature (Chilès and Delfiner, 2012) and are out of the scope of this work. The applicability of geostatistical simulation, especially plurigaussian, to model the layout of geological domains such as barren dykes has been shown in previous studies (Carrasco et al, 2007;Riquelme et al, 2008;Madani and Emery, 2014;Yunsel and Ersoy, 2013;Talebi et al, 2013Talebi et al, , 2014Rezaee et al, 2014).…”

Simulation of cement raw material deposits using plurigaussian technique

“…Gaussian-based methods are well-developed techniques and they include the advanced utilisation of the previously developed Truncated Gaussian Simulations techniques [1,3,4]. Plurigaussian simulation, the extension of Truncated Gaussian Simulation, exhibits better results in domain modelling of interrelated rock types by complex transitions and is becoming more popular in recent years [1,2,[5][6][7][8][9].…”

Application of plurigaussian simulation to delineate the layout of alteration domains in Sungun copper deposit

“…The choice of the plurigaussian approach is motivated by the fact that it enables the incorporation of geological knowledge, through the definition of the contact relationships between the alteration domains, the modeling of spatially-varying domain proportions, and the reproduction of conditioning data from exploration drill holes. In the last decade, this approach has proven to be versatile and has been applied to the modeling of ore deposits with varied geological settings, such as granitehosted deposits [19], roll-front uranium deposits [8,16], kimberlite pipes [6], copper porphyries [4,17,21], nickel laterites [14], or carbonate-hosted lead-zinc deposits [22].…”