Through one month of trial, Lujiang Project successfully filled gob area with waste rock instead of tailings, which not only reduced the cost, but immensely saved hauling capacity. This achievement was highly recognized by the Client.
As a contract mining project, JCHX is responsible for underground construction, hoisting, hauling, and filling operations. Due to the low concentration of tailings, filling strength does not meet the requirement after settlement, thus secondary filling is required which resulted in a lagged behind and low efficient filling capacity. Apart from that, waste rock from underground need to be transported to surface dump, the long hauling distance and low efficiency severely impact excavation schedule and increase cost.
In order to alleviate the aforesaid problems, it was proposed by the project team to dump waste rock into gob area for filling purpose, which shall on one hand ease the filling pressure, and on the other hand to increase hauling efficiency while reduce costs. As stoping comprises three phases, ie room stoping, pillar extraction, and rib pillar stoping. In order to ensure the safety during subsequent stoping, a distant gob area shall be chosen for filling while retaining wall and coupling ropes are arranged.
Since September 2018, we successfully filled the gob area with waste rock from exploration operations and mining area, which largely saved hauling capacity and costs while increasing mucking efficiency. Thus the limited hauling capacity can be focused on ore extraction.
Lujiang Project will look ahead at what might happen and prepare in advance for the filling plan on -354mL in 2019, and complete the lateral development for gypsum stope as needed for subsequent production work.
