Ok were you referring to using a funicular railway trolley with a caternary electric contact or electric haul trucks with a caternary? If so the latter is possible. An aerial ropeway would be possible.

An old deep copper mine here in the states used a either an electric or diesel railroad-Kennecott copper butte mine?

BUUUUUT:

what are you using for;

track drills, crawler shovels, haul trucks, water trucks, How do you expect to handle 34,500 volt power to 4160 to 600 volt or 480 volt-underground tunnels with utilities perhaps?

What bit size do you intend to have for drilling? drill pattern?, explosives selection? water gells, amfo slurries, dry amfo prills?

How big are your explosives magazines remember you will need two at least for one weeks loading of powders.

or will you contract the explosives work? what size benches are you intent on using? will you use a dozer to move copper and overburden or tracked excavator and haul truck?

What about equipment duty cycles? round the clock or 2 shifts per day what length of work shift? what about maintenance windows and built in repair time for breakdowns? remember the stock pile load out depends on the ore coming out of the pit and you need an adequate buffer.

What about the road to the mine what is its condition? How close is the nearest electrical grid?, or are you intent on generating your own power with diesel generator sets?

A simpler solution(in my opinon(what I would do to get an A) would be to raise bore and steel liner the shaft from the bottom of the pit and install a two or four ore skip loading and hoisting system with counter balanced ore skips powered by a tower mounted hoist (Kopfhe-I believe)to move the copper ore as was done at the white pine copper mine.

Loading and hoist cycle times will be short and an underground conveyor could feed the skip loader bins from the pit floor minus 1,200 foot elevation from a dump pile of minus 1 inch broken ore.

with 20-30 ton sized ore skips At that shallow depth you could acheive 240-250 skips an hour with a four skip system surpasing a high angle conveyor. BOOO, HISSS :^) ok I deserved that.

Another possibility is a counterweight skip system with twin ropes and a counter weight rail guide as is done at the CN Skylon towers elevators. and it would be simpler and less costly than two double drum hoists one behind the other hoisting four skips.

and all the ore skips would run continuosly not requiring the other skip to be either at the top of the shaft dumping or at the bottom loading at the pant leg bins.

The vertical pull with the drive motor, sheave, and counter weight will eliminate the yo yo bounce as well increasing wire rope life.

You would need two recieving bins- one for each side of the dump frame as the skips would be loaded and dumped opposite each other high enough to dump feed to a pair of open top ground hoppers or on the ground at the stock pile- some jungle mines dump right into a waiting haul truck!

Hoisting systems are built to run on a fully automatic mode and can run round the clock with regular maintenance.

You get an A+ if you place the bored shaft at the stock pile eliminating surface conveyors for one underground conveyor to the loading pocket and using the capsule pipeline to deliver the ore to the smelter if its overland.

Stamler Feeder breakers were used at the white pine mine as well to break copper ore.

Steep angle conveying has been done.

Hydraulic drives are used for conveyors as well, The mine I worked in has a 36 inch Continental that is hydraulic drive over mechanical.

Ore transport could be done with a capsule pipeline from the pit to the stock pile eliminating a belt conveyor(as is done at the Karasawa limestone mine in japan) (I know, I know, not again).

An excellent advantage to a single, twin or loop tube capsule pipeline is its ability to recapture electric energy on the return trip with a syncronus electric motor and feed it back into the system as the air used to propel the capsule trains is forced back trough the blower in reverse and generating current.

Minus 2 inch copper ore would overcome the weight of the individual capsule in a capsule pipeline and negate transport costs to almost zero as all you will be moving is copper ore and the weight of the capsules will zero out as the ore weighs more than a wheeled capsule no matter the size of the capsule-16-24- 36-42 inch

A slightly modifed series of top filled pantleg bins would fit nicely into the loading for the capsule trains as five cars in each train could be filled at once and run around the clock 7 days a week so a smaller delivery system 16-24 inch could work very well with a large stock pile window such as is used in power plants for coal stock yards- 90 days of storage for 24 hour operations as a rule.

Its fine to fill a stock pile but how fast are you going to unload it?

how are you going to load it? a dump station and dozer?-thats the least costly way-see above paragraph.

What about leaching into the ground water-does the stock pile have a barrier wall and floor?

In pit mobile crushers:

Pegson, kawasaki, Komatsu, Terex, Eagle and others but you will need to look for them as I am unaware of any gyratories that size, feed rate and being truely portable.

A gyratory will probably need a hydraulic arm to lift out over size ore that will not drop in the bowl-unless a narrow close shallow shot pattern is used on the ore benches.

Where will you build the ramp to dump into the crusher or will you dig a shallow trench into the pit floor for a lower dumping height and build a ramp with ore so it(the ore) is completely recoverable prior to moving the crusher? that is the nice thing about belt feeder breakers you can bury them up to the lip of the hopper with few problems or have an open end hopper to dump into leaving everything exposed.

And the biggest factor is that it can follow the mining face at a very short distance reducing haulage time and breaking time-mind you I have seen a few times that the ore was blown right into the hopper from the face!!!

The smaller you crush it the the more dense the product is.

A crusher of that size(in my opinion) ideally would be a tracked belt feeder breaker rather than a gyratory crusher to be fully mobile, no waiting to dump, wth an integral track drive-it also requires less work and less maintenance. Power is simply a trailing cable and weatherproof control panel.

Its been many years, but I knew at one time WR Stamler sold a tracked feeder breaker to an oil sands company with a throughput of possibly that much ore. It had its own operators shed mounted on the breaker and it(the completed breaker unit with a hopper) was bigger than most houses.

Feeder breakers are used in copper and other ores and have been in existance for almost sixty years. Number one in the business is WR Stamler with a world wide presence; number two is Long Airdox with thier Roscoe feeder breaker.

Now that I have brushed my teeth with gun powder and shot my mouth off I am sure the other members(with much more knowledge and experience than I possess) will add material to your quest for nformation.

Mr. Gary Blenkhorn, Mr. Joseph Dos Santos, Mr George Baker, Mr Anil Seth, Mr. Lawrence Nordell, Mr. Amrit Agwar, Mr. Lyn Bates Mr. John Gately , Mr. Lyle Brown, Mr Graham Spriggs, and many other fine members will help you with this I am sure, but the desired conveyor angles and angle of attack are troublesome as any ore will fall back on a conveyor with a conveyor greater than 21 degrees-depending of sizing of ore and belt speed of course except for a sandwich conveyor from Mr. Dos Santos-since his conveyors can lift a TBM motor out of the ground with little effort it will not have trouble lifting copper ore.:^)

lzaharis ■