Andres Brzovic

• Doctor of Philosophy
• International Rock Mechanics Consultant at WSP Vancouver

Caveability, fragmentation, and ground stability are important aspects impacting production reliability in a caving mine and can be fatal flaws if they are not properly assessed. In addition, there is evidence from historical and current caving mines that revenue recovery loss has occurred due to production disruption from these aspects. The root c...

Volumetric fracture intensity (P32) is a parameter that plays a major role in the mechanical and hydraulic behaviour of rock masses. While methods such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) are available to map the 3D geometrical characteristics of the fractures, the direct measurement of P32 at a resolution compatible with geotechnical applications is...

Veined rock masses can be found in porphyry copper deposits like at the El Teniente mine in Chile. Rock masses with cemented joints or veins cannot be accurately represented using the methods commonly applied to predict the deformability and strength of jointed rock masses. Laboratory tests on veined rock andesite from the El Teniente mine have sho...

During the last 35 years, El Teniente mine has mined the massive and competent primary ore, associated with coarse fragmentation among other operational problems. After primary ore mining began, the geological department started to track fragmentation in draw points to understand and predict the process. An overall review of the existing database a...

Block caves and other mass mines are the future of global copper supply due to the depletion of surface mines with high production rates and the reduced rates of discovery of easily accessible copper resources. Many current and proposed caving mines are hosted within geological environments that have produced discontinuous fault systems in massive...

Este póster aborda una caracterización geométrica de fallas de Mina El Teniente y la estimación de la resistencia al corte de un grupo de ellas. Presentado en el XV Congreso Geológico Chileno (XVCGCH) en la sección Geología Ingenieril y Ambiental (GIAM).

Este resumen aborda una caracterización geométrica de fallas de Mina El Teniente y la estimación de la resistencia al corte de un grupo de ellas. Presentado en el XV Congreso Geológico Chileno (XVCGCH) en la sección Geología Ingenieril y Ambiental (GIAM).

Wet muck entry is one of the major geotechnical risks associated with long-term production goals in cave mining. The objective of this research is to quantify the effect of the main risk variables related to wet muck entry in an effort to prioritize and confront these variables accordingly. Logistic regression modeling was carried out using mine da...

At the El Teniente mine, most observed cases of rock damage during rock bursts in tunnels and mine drives are the result of structurally controlled wedges. Therefore during tunnel development it is critical to firstly obtain detailed rock structure descriptions and to then secondly characterise and understand the rock structure surrounding the exca...

This work addresses the problem of predicting the discontinuity intensity P32 (discontinuity area per unit volume of rock mass) in space and of quantifying the uncertainty in the true P32 values, using information from observed discontinuities intersecting boreholes. This problem is relevant in various fields of engineering, including mining applic...

Over the last decade, the advantages of discrete fracture network (DFN) models over more conventional tools for key block stability analysis have become increasingly apparent. Without their need for a series of simplifying assumptions regarding the fracture system, rock wedge formation and excavation geometry, DFN’s ability to accurately capture th...

Fragmentation is one of the most relevant parameters in the design and operation of a mine using the caving mining method. Fragmentation affects all subsequent operations, including extraction, comminution processes, secondary blasting and transportation. There are a number of different models in the literature to estimate the size of the ore fragm...

Rock masses of the primary copper ore at the El Teniente mine fail mainly through the infill of preexisting veins during the caving processes, especially through those composed of less than 35% hard minerals (quartz and pyrite). In this study, the Synthetic Rock Mass (SRM) approach is used to reproduce the results of ten uniaxial compression tests...

The El Teniente deposit can be described as a typical porphyry Co - Mo system being one of the largest in the world, it is located in the central Chile porphyry belt. The El Teniente Cu- Mo deposit is hosted by the late Miocene Teniente Mafic Complex (TMC), a largely sub-volcanic package of primarily basaltic-andesitic porphyry sills and stocks emp...

Two different pre-conditioning techniques have been applied at the Sur Andes mine sector (SuaPi) of the El Teniente mine in order to improve caving performance of the primary copper ore, which can be considered as a typical heavily veined massive, competent and unfractured rock masses. Hydraulic fracturing (HF) and blasting under confined condition...

A comprehensive geotechnical characterization has been undertaken at the El Teniente mine to describe and determine the rock mass behaviour strength properties of the primary copper ore. This type of rock can be considered as a heavily veined massive and unfractured rock mass. This compressive work is focused sequentially on; 1) an intensive struct...

A comprehensive geotechnical characterization has been undertaken at the El Teniente mine to describe and determine the rock mass behaviour strength properties of the primary copper ore. This type of rock can be considered as a heavily veined massive and unfractured rock mass. This comprehensive work is focused sequentially on; 1) an intensive stru...

Application of hydraulic fracturing for preconditioning of hard rock in underground caving mines has been demonstrated to be an effective means to induce and promote cave growth. Using Itasca's particle flow code PFC 2D, a real scale numerical test environment has been developed to assess the effect of preconditioning by hydraulic fracturing on pri...

The Synthetic Rock Mass (SRM) technique has been used to study the strength and deformation behavior of the rock mass domain Mafic Complex from El Teniente Mine (CMET-HW). The SRM approach uses PFC3D to represent the intact rock as an assembly of bonded particles and an embedded Discrete Fracture Network to represent the joints as disc-shaped flaws...

El Teniente Mine is the largest known copper–molybdenum deposit and one of the largest underground mine operations in the world. The mine is currently extracting around 140,000 tons/day using mechanised caving methods, where almost all the caving operations are being undertaken within primary ore. Esmeralda is one of the most important operations a...

Direct shear and direct tensile tests have been conducted on specimens taken from drill cores of porphyry ore from the El Teniente mine containing infilled veins and bands of e g copper sulphide. The direct shear tests were conducted at different normal stress levels in order to determine the failure shear strengths. The direct tensile tests were c...

Using the commercial FracMan software package, discrete fracture model (DFN) of the geological stockwork veins has been built at the El Teniente mine that honoured data collected in drill cores and mine drives. DFN models explicitly represent key vein structures in 3D and require as a minimum data, the orientation, the size and the intensity of the...

The primary copper ore at the El Teniente Mine is a very competent and massive rock mass with almost no open discontinuities. Nevertheless, there is a network of high frequency, small scale healed veins coupled with widely spaced faults. In addition, recent work has found that veins filled with particular mineralogical infill and thicknesses are mo...

The primary copper ore at the El Teniente mine is very competent and massive. It is a rock with almost no open discontinuities. Nevertheless, there is a high frequency network of small scale veins coupled with widely spaced faults. A research investigation was implemented to determine what discontinuities are the most relevant in the rock mass disa...

Data collection to determine the characteristics of block-forming discontinuities during primary ore caving was undertaken in the production level draw points of El Teniente mine. Results from data collection of caved rock show that thick veins (>2mm), which have less than 1/3 of hard minerals as infill, were preferably opened up during caving. Thi...

This thesis investigated the rock mass geotechnical behaviour of primary copper ore at the El Teniente mine in Chile, which has been described as a massive and competent rock mass. The rock mass was characterised considering different structural data collection techniques and mapping scales. Modifications were made to the traditional sampling metho...