Mining Flashcards
What is the Flow chart of ISRU processes?
Excavation , Beneficiation, Extraction
What is an inferred resource?
- Based on limited sampling
- Reasonably assumed
What is an indicated resource?
- Quantity can be confidently reported
- Larger, closely spaced samples
- Viability calculations can be made
What is a measured resource?
- Well established characteristics
- Economic factors can be applied
- Mine and production planning
What is a reserve?
An economically mineable part of a measured or indicated resource demonstrated by atleast a feasibility study
What is an ore and what is it typically composed of?
The material that contains economically extractable minerals / metals
Composed of:
- Valuable material
- Non-valuable material
- Waste rock
What is strip ratio?
Mass of regolith removed per mass of regolith ore
What is yield?
Mass of product produced per mass of feed
What is recovery?
Mass of product produced per mass of product in feed
What are the fundamental steps of a mining operation?
- Rock preparation
- Excavation
- Hauling
- Transfer
What are the four types of mining?
Underground (Expensive)
Surface (Most common)
Placer (Mining a stream bed)
In-Situ (Dissolve mineral in water while still in Earth)
When does underground mining become neccesaty?
When stripping ratio is uneconomical
What is benificiation?
Concentration of a specific component of a mineral feed stock
What are target lunar minerals?
- Ilmenite
- Anorthosite
- Fe- bearing minerals
What are requirements for beneficiation of lunar regolith?
- Size separation
- Method of specific concentration
What are properties useful for beneficiation?
- Size and shape
- Density
- Magnetic properties
- Conductivity
- Surface properties
- Optical properties
What is a probable/proven reserve?
Probable: Economic extraction can be justified
Proven: Economic extraction is justified
What are some underground mining methods?
- Drift mine (level entrance)
- Slope mine (sloped entrance)
- Shaft mine (vertical entrance)
What are some surface mining methods?
- Mountaintop mine
- Contour mine (mine along contour)
- Highwall or Auger mine (mine exposed overburden)
- Area mine (mine general area)
What are some underground mining methods that don’t require supports?
- Room and pillar (natural pillars, only fraction of ore minable)
- Stoping (recover steeply dipping orebodies)
What is an underground mining method that requires support?
- Cut and fill (Horizontal slices mined and refilled)
What are caving methods?
- Used where ore or host rock can’t support own weight
- Block caving (suitable for large volumes of rock, long development time)
- Sublevel caving (similar to block caving, but starts at top)
- Longwall mining (applied to thin and flat-lying deposits)
What are some surface mining methods?
- Strip mining (Ores in shallow subsurface, need to be stripped to access)
–> Area stripping
–> Contour mining - Open pit mining (same as strip mining, but no refill)
How can the terrestrial mining approaches be related to space?
- Different environments, smaller production scale, go after “easy” minerals
- Natural loose material (no rock preparation or blasting)
- Integrate unit operations (excavator and hauling combined, direct processing)
- Processor in fixed location
What are properties of space mining?
- High degree of autonomy
- Missing navigation (no GPS requirement)
- Low need for maintenance and repair
- Limited energy sources
- Low reaction force due to reduced gravity
- Dust evolution and dust resiliance
- Unknown soil properties
- Temperature gradients, thermal management
What are the steps for asteroid mining?
- Stabilization
- Moving to orbit (Earth: mining for PGM, Moon: Mining water)
- Mining in zero gravity
What is WRANGLER?
Weightless Rendezvous And Net Grapple to Limit Excess Rotation (capture and de-spin asteroid)
What is APIS?
- Asteroid Provided In-Situ Supplies
- Encapsulate asteroid
- Inflatable solar concentrator heats surface
- Outgassed water cryopumped, separated from dust and stored as ice
- Water returned to LDRO
What are some discrete (complete) excavators?
- Back loader
- Scraper
- Front loader
What are some continuous, partial excavators?
- Bucket wheel
- Bucket drum
- Flexible auger
- Impeller
What are some continuous, complete excavators?
- Pneumatic
- Bucket ladder
- Bucket drum
- Bucket wheel
What is NASA RASSOR?
- Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot
- Counterrotating bucket drums on opposing arms (near-zero reaction force)
- Load, haul, dump under extremely low gravity conditions with high reliability
- Compact and lightweight
What are metric for selecting transport systems?
- Mass
- Power
- Feed rate
- TRL
- Mobility
- Robustness
- Dust risk
- Lunar gravity effect
Do beneficiation processes comprise of a single step?
No
Goal is to reach target product specification in as few steps as possible
What are some challenges of beneficiation?
- Technical (e.g. fine dry heterogeneous granular material cannot be beneficiated at the moment)
- System (requirements currently unspecified)
