425 2. METHODOLOGY 2.1. Geometallurgical Block Model Construction A three-dimensional representation of the heap was constructed using monthly topographic surfaces. Incremental solids were discretized into regular volumetric blocks corresponding to the minimum operational discharge unit. Each block was assigned: Gold, silver, and copper grades, cyanide solubility parameters, and source attribution variables. During heap construction modeling, each block inherited grade values according to its origin. This procedure ensures that geometallurgical variability is preserved based on material source, rather than using global averaging across the entire dataset. Derived variables included: Contained metal, Recoverable metal. 2.2. Exploratory Data Analysis 2.2.1 Temporal Dynamics The heap leach system exhibits delayed production response relative to ore placement, confirming the presence of internal inventory dynamics and time-dependent recovery behavior. To quantify this delayed response, the cross-correlation between gold production and gold placement was computed as: Figure 1 – Lag correlation (Corr(k)=corr(Productiont , Placedt-k)) as function of gold production and gold placement. Maximum correlation occurs at short lags (0–2 months), with gradual decay over longer lags. This confirms that recovery response is delayed but not instantaneous. The decay structure suggests a distributed recovery function rather than a single fixed delay. 0.50 0.55 0.60 0.65 0.70 0.75 0.80 0.85 0.90 0.95 1.00 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 Correlation Time
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