188 A STOPE‑SCALE MULTIPHYSICS FRAMEWORK FOR OPTIMISING IN‑PLACE RECOVERY OF COPPER *Zhihe Wang1, Chaoshui Xu1, Peter Dowd1, Peter Dare-Bryan2, Armineh Hassanvand2, David Hunter3 1School of Chemical Engineering, Adelaide University, Australia, (*Presenting author: zhihe.wang@adelaide.edu.au) 2Orica Australia, Australia 3Core Resources, Australia ABSTRACT As shallow mineral resources are depleted, mining is moving to deeper, lower-grade, and more complex deposits, creating economic and technological challenges. As a low-cost and low-environmental-footprint mining technique, underground leaching is gaining increasing attention for low-grade deposits. In hard-rock formations, In-Place Recovery (IPR) has can be both economically viable and technically feasible for extracting minerals from low-grade orebodies. With IPR, stopes are blasted to enhance permeability, and a lixiviant is applied to dissolve target minerals. The pregnant leach solution is collected underground for processing, thereby reducing energy consumption, land use, waste generation, and operating costs. To assess IPR performance, this study presents a stope-scale multiphysics modelling approach that couples variably-saturated fluid flow, lixiviant transport, and chemical reaction. This enables physics-based simulation of an IPR operation to predict both lixiviant migration and mineral recovery under varying ore mineralogy, blasted ore size distribution, irrigation rate, lixiviant dosing, and stope geometry. Using ore samples from an Australian mine site, key material properties measured in the lab were used as model input to simulate IPR in a single stope over a 12-month period. Multiple cases with different leaching parameters were examined to assess the leaching performance under various conditions. The outcomes of this study highlight the model's capability for IPR feasibility assessment and operational optimisation. KEYWORDS Sustainable mineral extraction, In-Place Recovery, low-grade copper, multiphysics simulation
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM0Mzk2