Newgrange is an authorised distributor of the Chasm Consulting suit of software, including PumpSim™ and VentSim Visual™ . These two products are the industry leading software for the design, simulation and optimisation of mine ventilation and mine water management.

In addition to software distribution, Newgrange can provide introductory level or custom designed training and mentoring in the application of Chasm Consulting’s software. Training can be delivered on-site using client supplied data as part of the initial purchase of the software or as part of a broader implementation of the MPxQ or MINES process.

Newgrange’s years of experience with the design and management of ventilation and mine water management projects can help your project achieve the maximum return on infrastructure investment with mentoring or peer review of the system. Clients have the opportunity to gain access to skill sets and experience that have proven ability to optimise their infrastructure network using the MINES process.

Newgrange’s years of experience with management of mining studies at all levels of confidence can help your project achieve the maximum return on the investment or provide a fresh set of eyes to review the mine design. In addition to delivering a range of feasibility studies, peer reviews and life of mine strategies, Newgrange has championed the development of innovative solutions for the challenges of mine planning processes, reserve/resource estimations and the analysis of mine services network.

Newgrange’s expertise in mine planning can help identify the critical processes, map the process flow, determine the supplier-customer relationships and define roles/responsibilities that help complete a mining study on time and exceed the clients expectation. Our clients can benefit from the synergy of our knowledge and skills as well as theirs to help develop solutions for new projects, existing life of mine plans or network constraints and challenges.

Newgrange can provide assistance with the tender documentation and evaluations. In addition, Newgrange has an extensive network of affiliated mining professionals that provide a range of services that can extend Newgrange’s capability in transparent and compatible environment.

The existing water services (supply, drainage and de-watering) and ventilation capacity can quickly become inadequate as the mine workings are extended if the mine service networks are not treated as critical aspect of the production process. The opportunity cost of inadequate mine service capacity is often ignored while productivity reduces due to increased delays from poorly designed or located service infrastructure.

To optimise the performance and capital costs of mine infrastructure, 3-dimensional analysis is required to provide meaning results due to the spatial components of service networks. The Chasm Consulting suite of software provides true scale 3-dimensional models that can simulate both existing and planned service networks.

The Mine Network Evaluations and Simulations (MINES) process uses the simulation results from mine water and ventilation models to evaluate their ability to support the planned mining activities. All stages of the network duty cycle (development, production and conduit) can be analysed over the life of mine design and the results used to improve productivity as well as capital budgeting.

The results generated from the MINES process can help deliver benefits such as improved optimisation of capital infrastructure, better matching of capacity to requirement and help with quick cost-benefit analysis of “what-if” questions. The MINES process can simulate the duty at one point in time to demonstrate the networks capacity over a given time period using dynamic simulation.

The design parameters can be easily transferred across the project or operation as a template for less experienced engineers to help simplify future mine planning. This provides the potential for cost saving by “standardising” the mine infrastructure design and components .

A robust mine planning process is critical to any underground mine in order to ensure resource development, reserve conversion and mine infrastructure capacity can support the scheduled mining activities over the long term. Mine Planning by Quarters (MPxQ) has been developed to ensure that all stages of mine planning, operations and mine services are integrated within the business plan.

The MPxQ has been used and modified for over 10 years at several locations and helped deliver improved production and compliance to the plan across the full range of planning horizons as measured against planning indicators. After the implementation of the MPxQ process at one mine the standard deviation of monthly production compared to quarterly forecast was reduced to 4kt from 11kt and compliance to budget was up to nearly 90% or close to a 10% improvement from the previous year.

A pillar of the MPxQ concept is a strong medium term planning capacity that provides a strong link between the life of mine plan and the short term operations schedules. This is achieved by evaluating the degree of resource conversion, level of engineering design confidence and scheduling detail required to allow the seamless flow of long term plans into achievable short term schedules.

The impact of delays due to inadequate or unavailable mine services are often ignored in many mine plans especially when they are built from historical mine productivities. Newgrange can model the existing mine services networks in order to demonstrate whether the designed ventilation and mine water network have the capacity and reliability to support the planned mining activities.