1759 operations with the same model parameters. This approach can be quite effective for heap leaching, as the column tests are designed to represent the actual operation conditions, such as with the same ore particle size distribution (PSD), irrigation rate, and feed lixiviant concentration. Moreover, the heaps are often engineered to have uniform and homogenous material properties through ore crushing, grinding, and often agglomeration, which further warrants the direct upscaling of the column test results. For IPR, however, the blasted stope contains a much wider range of ore sizes (Wang et al., 2025). This requires a lot more column tests with larger column sizes to generate representative results for model fitting, which can take significantly more time with a higher cost (Hassanvand et al., 2025b). Figure 1 – Illustration of In-Place Recovery (IPR) with (a) blasted stopes, (b) lixiviant irrigation, and (c) pregnant leach solution transportation, after (Hassanvand et al., 2025a). To address the above-mentioned challenge, in this work, we present a multiphysics-based modelling approach that captures the key physical processes at the stope scale. The model only requires physical properties, reaction kinetic parameters, and boundary conditions as input to simulate the leaching process of IPR, thereby reducing the need for extensive laboratory testing in future. We show the capabilities of the model to simulate an IPR operation using material properties obtained from ore samples collected from the Prominent Hill Mine, Australia, as described in our previous work (Hassanvand et al., 2025b). Senarios were simulated with different leaching parameters to assess the performance of copper recovery for an operation duration of 12 months. 2. IPR MODELLING
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