f.m. torab

High gas volume is the main reason of explosion, rock burst and fatal coal mining disasters. In a coal mining project, it is necessary to model the gas volume at all parts of the target seam. Amoung coal resources of Iran, Parvadeh I has high gas bearing seams with an average of 14 m3/t of gas. C1 coal seam is the main mining target in Parvadeh I and it was explored by 134 core drilling boreholes. Gas study has been carried out for 35 boreholes, in only central and eastern parts of the deposit. Gas volume is not measured at the deep western parts. In this study, fractured zones are identified and their gas data removed from the gas modelling procedure. It is found that gas volume and seam depth are highly correlated and also, two separated populations are evident in the gas vol. – depth cross plot. The first population is related to oxidized shallow, and the second one is interpreted as deep methane bearing zones of the seam. Using the regression kriging method with the seam depth as the auxiliary variable, the gas volume is estimated for the whole mining blocks of the C1 seam. The validity of the estimations is evaluated as 94% by the Jackknife method. In order to avoid the smoothing effect of kriging, the probability of critical gas zones (> 20 m3/t) is modelled by the conditional indicator cosimulation. Results demonstrated that 1.43 million m2 of the C1 seam with the probability of 75%, and 0.38 million m2 with the probability of 100% fell into the critical category. These critical gas zones are located in central, southern and western Parvadeh I. These zones are considered to be the main targets for the future gas drainage studies.

In this research, the optimum block size determination method and its influence on reserve estimation were investigated. For this purpose, the Kushk lead and zinc deposit data were used as case study. The database was built using borehole data and the composite samples were prepared with a 2m length. The data was transformed to Gaussian distribution by normal score transformation method. Variography was used for identification of variability and continuity of the ore, and the best variogram models and anisotropy ellipsoids were fitted. Due to ore complexity and density of boreholes in open pit and undergrounds, indicator kriging method was used for orebody modeling and ore-waste boundary determination. Considering different block size, the lead and zinc grade variability was modeled by sequential Gaussian simulation method. In each block size simulation, 20 realizations were determined and the variances between realizations were calculated. The lower variance is accordance with more similarity of realizations which was selected as a criterion of optimum block size determination. With this method, the optimum block size of Kushk deposit was determined as 10x10x7.5 m. The optimum block size is relatively accordance with the anisotropy ratio at the deposit, therefore it was chosen as suitable block size for reserve estimation of the deposit. By this optimum block size, and considering a 3% cut off grade for sum of lead and zinc, the reserve of the deposit was calculated about 39.12 million tons.