3394 THE DEVELOPMENT OF A LINEAR CUTTING MACHINE USED TO CHARACTERISE FEM MODELLING PARAMETERS FOR CUTTING UG2 REEF
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17159/Abstract
South Africa has two main platinum reef deposits namely Merensky reef and UG2 reef. These reefs are currently mined using traditional drilling and blasting methods. Mechanised cutting could potentially enable continuous mining which would offer significant advantages. This would require thorough understanding of the cutability of the rock. To explore this, a linear cutting machine was developed to conduct laboratory scale cutting tests. This work describes the development and commissioning of the cutting machine using sandstone, as well as subsequent characterisation tests on UG2 reef samples.
UG2 reef has large variability in strength on a millimeter scale. This introduces uncertainty in the test results due to added variance from one cut to the next for the same UG2 reef sample. Another problem is the variability in rock properties of the UG2 reef, when testing samples from different mines. The cutting tests led to fine fragmentation, which is known to be a significant problem for cleaning operations in underground stopes and warrants further research.
A finite element method simulation of the rock cutting was conducted using ANSYS LS-DYNA and the continuous surface cap model to simulate rock cutting in the UG2 reef. It was found that it is possible to use LS-DYNA with the continuous surface cap model to model rock cutting of UG2 reef and get acceptable results, but the user must calibrate the model parameters using the experimental results. Therefore, the model is only fit for one set of cutting parameters and further work is required to generalise results.
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Copyright (c) 2024 Ulrich Du Preez, Phillippus Stephanus Heyns, Daniel Francois Malan
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