Introduction to Mine Water Balance Modeling with GoldSim
Presenter
David Hoekstra, SRK Consulting (US)
David is a civil engineer with 35 years of experience in the mining, solid waste and oil and gas sectors. He has been developing water balances using GoldSim since the late 1990’s and was one of the original GoldSim beta testers. David has developed GoldSim water balances across the globe and for precious and base metals, coal, diamonds, and waste products. David contributed several chapters to the 2022 SME Tailings Management Handbook and has taught several short courses for the Tailings Center on Tailings Water Management.
Duration
2 days on Saturday and Sunday
Overview
This course will focus on teach the basics of Mine Water Balance modeling using the GoldSim simulation platform. Attendees are required to have a basic familiarity with GoldSim so we can go straight to water balance modeling. If you have limited experience with GoldSim, a free online course is available (www.goldsim.com) that covers general GoldSim skills that will be needed as a foundation for this short course prior to attending. A similar course is available for the GoldSim Contaminate Transport Model and may be beneficial, but is not necessary. Contaminate transport will only be touched on briefly during this short course. A temporary GoldSim license will be included with the course, attendees will be required to bring their own laptop to run the GoldSim software on with sufficient administrator rights to install commercial software. The course will be largely discipline independent, but a basic understanding of the water related processes encountered in a mine, such as hydrology, hydraulics, hydrogeology, and process circuits water use will be beneficial.
The two-day short course will cover the following topics with the intent of demonstrating the techniques and approaches used to develop, implement, and utilize a mine water balance.
• What is a mine water management water balance, how is it different from water balances used for other disciplines
• Goals of a mine water balance
• Why do you need a water balance, what is it good for? Who is (are) the end users?
• Defining the water balance objectives
• Developing the conceptual and mathematical models (flowsheets, battery limits, facility types, physical processes)
• Collecting and developing the model inputs (dynamic inputs, step vs interpolation, spreadsheet links)
• Construct and develop the model, what level of detail is needed? What elements should I use? Tips, tricks and pitfalls.
• Water and load balances, when and how to incorporate the GoldSim Contaminate Transport Model.
• Documentation, embedded graphics and equations, Dashboards
• Calibration of the model
• Reporting, predictions, and implementation
• Updates and maintenance
• Who owns the model, who uses it, and who updates it?
The course will be a blend of lectures, examples and sample problems