June 18, 2024
Muon Tomography for High-Resolution Void Mapping
Located and mapped a 100 metre-long section of a 2.5 m x 2.5 m mine conveyance tunnel, imaging upwards from the existing mine adit, with zero drilling required to map a subsurface volume of over 300,000 m3 and clearly delineate the low-density feature sitting approximately 35 m below the surface.
NORCAT Mining Transformed
PROJECT
Sudbury, Canada
LOCATION
Panel & Borehole In-Mine
IDEON DETECTOR TYPES
Linear voids/tunnels
TARGET FEATURE
Value Impacts
Unexpected subsurface voids cost mining companies hundreds of millions of dollars each year in equipment, time, remediation, and opportunity. Whether naturally occurring or man-made (such as historic mine workings), voids can lead to considerable ground instability and operational risk. They can cause sinking or sudden collapse, resulting in property, equipment, and environmental damage – even loss of life. Ideon offers mining companies the ability to confidently and safely locate and map voids before any equipment or personnel are deployed in a target zone.
BACKGROUND
The NORCAT Underground Centre in Sudbury is the world’s only operating underground mine designed to enable the development, testing, and demonstration of emerging technologies poised to transform the global mining industry. The Centre is hosted in the former Fecunis Adit Mine, previously owned by Falconbridge (now Glencore) and closed for operations in 1977. NORCAT hosts the Mining Transformed technology exhibition in the mine, expediting technology adoption and diffusion of innovation across the global mining sector.
IDEON SOLUTION
This project was designed to showcase capabilities of the newly released Ideon in-mine imaging solution. Ideon installed its in-mine imaging solution at the Centre in February 2024, gathering data for 3 months prior to the Mining Transformed event. The target was the overburden above the main tunnel of the facility and the imaging program was conducted blind: no geological information was available for the area.
Illustration showing the positions of the in-mine imaging equipment in the NORCAT mine adit, the large fields of view covered as the muon detectors image upwards towards the surface, and the 2D radiographs outlining a linear low-density anomaly corresponding to the conveyance tunnel above.
Following system commissioning, data intake and analysis were conducted remotely throughout the imaging period to verify quality and calibration. During analysis, a strong low-density feature emerged that – when compared with hand-drawn maps of historic subsurface workings in the area – aligned directly with a conveyance tunnel measuring approximately 2.5m x 2.5 m (8 ft x 8 ft) that once carried ore to the surface of the mine.
Section view of the density model showcasing the linear tunnel feature (blue), as imaged above the Ideon muon detectors positioned in the mine adit beneath, mapped to metre-scale accuracy. Note that the resolved tunnel density is 0 g/cc – the scale of the colour map is truncated to show more detail.