Vulcan LVA – Pushing boundaries in folded grade modelling

When I was about 5 years old my neighbourhood friend and I were digging in his mother’s garden when we found some yellow coloured sandstone. Thinking these yellow rocks were gold, we subsequently spent hours digging holes all over the yard trying to find more.

In the early 80s while I was busy building stockpiles of gold (sandstone), Maptek was well underway in developing Vulcan mine planning software. Since then, Vulcan has been continually improved and there’s a suite of exciting features on the way in version 9.

The release of Vulcan 9 is fast approaching, and will contain a Locally Varying Anisotropy (LVA) option for grade estimation.

This new technique is based on recent developments, and will allow samples to be searched for following irregular paths such as folded or faulted structures. In other words, the shortest path may no longer be a straight line or even follow a continuous route.

Vulcan has a range of tools that improve grade estimations in datasets that are directionally dependent, or anisotropic. Examples include, deposits within folded geological domains, or other non-linear deposits such as uranium roll fronts. LVA in the Unfolding menu is a new approach to tackle the challenge of estimating such deposits.

For resource geologists who do not have access to Vulcan and its estimation tools, working on such deposits can involve painstaking and laborious manual processes. Vulcan 9 eliminates the struggle by providing advanced estimation techniques in the Block menu. The new LVA method exploits the known, local anisotropy in an efficient manner to increase the accuracy of modelling.

Existing Vulcan GeoStatModeller license holders will find the new LVA functionality available once they move to Vulcan 9. In the release, new Vulcan GeoStatModeller licenses will also include LVA. License holders of other Vulcan Bundles can upgrade their estimation options to include LVA as well.

While Vulcan 9 would not have saved my gold mine – a basic knowledge of geology was needed for that – the new LVA tool may be just what you need to improve the estimation of your resource.

If you want to learn more about these features please contact your local Maptek office.