Software for the determination of optimal profiles for slopes and pitwalls
On a mission to transform mining into an
efficient and clean business
Our product
OptimalSlope
is intelligent software that designs optimal mine pitwalls. Because of the optimality of the pitwall shape, the amount
of waste rock to be excavated is substantially reduced and so in turn the cost of excavation resulting in higher profits and lower carbon footprint.
The excavation of a mine incurs costs typically in the order of hundreds of million USD. Lower costs would allow higher profitability and more mining projects coming to fruition.
long time to design
Current
pitwall profiles are designed by geotechnical consultants on the basis of their
experience and overly simplified formulae (e.g. use of stability charts). No software for the design of pitwalls
exist.
high carbon footprint
Mining
is a highly carbon intensive industry needing urgent solutions to reduce mining
carbon footprint.
inefficient design
The current
life-of-mine design methodology is sequential: pitwall profiles are provided by
geotechnical consultants to mining engineers who run pit optimisers. No
iterations are performed between pit optimisation and pitwall design so the
resulting mine design (pushbacks and UPL) often turn out to be highly
suboptimal.
The benefits brought by OptimalSlope:
Optimize Project NPV
OptimalSlope has been tested on 4 peer reviewed case studies
of small-medium metalliferous mines with increases of Net Present Value obtained in
comparison with the design based on traditional methodology of up to 52%.
Reduce Carbon Footprint
OptimalSlope helps mining companies towards
their ESG objectives. Adopting the pitwall profiles determined by OptimalSlope leads to average reductions of CO2 equivalent emissions of 30,000 tonnes a year per mine. If our solution was adopted in all mines, a reduction of 150 million tonnes of CO2 a year could be achieved.
Intelligent
and efficient mining design
OptimalSlope replaces the need for time consuming back and
forth between geotechnical and mining teams in the strategic life-of-mine
design phase. The output of OptimalSlope can be fed directly into the pit optimiser of choice to work out pushbacks and the Ultimate Pit Limit.
Quick and User Friendly
OptimalSlope is highly parallelised so that the heavy calculations
involved to find the optimal profile for each sector of a mine pit can be
performed in reasonable times. A user friendly GUI is used for the input and output of the data.
Cloud Based
OptimalSlope does not require any dongle or physical device but it is deployed on the AWS cloud. This allows best management of computational resources so that the right
computational power is always made available.
Bespoke Service
We
have a flexible pricing model: you can purchase a licence for use of the code
on a subscription basis (annual or monthly) or you can ask a quote for a
consultancy to get the strategic design of the mine and anything in
between including training.
Committed to revolutionise mining to build a better tomorrow
Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at Newcastle University (UK), MEng MSc PhD, Chartered Engineer & Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineering, Eur Ing, member of the International Technical Committee ISSMGE 208 “Slope stability in engineering practice"
A civil engineer by training and a problem solver by vocation, Andrea is in the final stages of receiving his PhD in geotechnical engineering from Newcastle University
Our
team is made of geotechnical engineers, software engineers, and computer
scientists. If you are interested in joining us or in any further information please see our Team page
Our supporters
We are part of two complimentary start-up accelerators in the CleanTech space: The Greenhouse of the Grantham Institute Better Futures of the London Greater Authority
