Experiences from Experimental Mining in Brazil

The Experimental Mine (EM) of the Research Center of Responsible Mining of the University of São Paulo became the subject of investigation in a few years after its development ; it is an open-pit quarry currently exploiting marble and gneiss , used to produce industrial limestone and construction aggregates. It is a developing enterprise, dealing with the challenges of a technological upgrade from a small -scale operation to the characteristics of a medium -sized company. The Experimental Mine Project (EMP) was born to attend a double demand: to provide research and development (R&D ) support to a growing company and to provide experimental opportunity for a field of knowledge such as mining engineering that requires a large scale for its experiments. The main challenges of the EMP are related with the remaining small -scale mining features, such as large variety of equipment available, high level of operational flexibility, scarcity or absence of mine planning, being focused on daily operations. In such an environment, the first role of the EMP was to evaluate in a quantitative way the effects of unit operations over the whole mining process. The current excavation technique is by drilling and blasting. Many experimental campaigns have been conducted on site, with different purposes. One of the main research lines was to increase the productivity of the quarry by lowering production costs and improving the quality of the product, then optimizing the entire production cycle; the relationship between the unit costs of drilling and explosives were evaluated, as well as the link between the blast design and some factors affecting the downstream processing of the product. The paper describes the methods employed to conduct the research and the improvements to be pursued, with the due consideration to the influence and interference of the many parameters involved, from the rock-mass characteristics to the final products.