Ring design overview

The RING DESIGN menu allows you to access a special subset of GRAPHICS functions to assist underground miners who use ring drilling in their mining method.

Ring Design will help you position a scale drawing of a drill carousel and drill holes at a given toe spacing over a given number of holes or between a pair of 'cardinal holes'. Ring Design can generate parallel holes, holes at a given bearing and can generate holes from multiple rig positions.

The total hole distance from collar to end-of-hole for each hole will be calculated. Ring Design can also be used to define detonator delays and charging sequence for each hole.

Pre-requisites
Terminology
Plotting

Ring Design

Pre-requisites

In order to use Ring Design, you will need the following files:

A `sequence' of sections representing the surveyed openings. Each section should contain the openings as closed segments of any string number. The term 'surveyed openings' is considered to be synonymous with 'drive outline' in this documentation.
A `sequence' of sections representing the stope outline envelope(s) for the given ring. The outlines should also be closed segments of any string number in their group of files. Alternatively, Ring Design allows design of fixed length holes without the use of stope outlines.

These files can be easily extracted from solids representing stopes and drives by using CL Slice or Slice Obj on the SOLIDS menu.

For small scale designs

For ring designs which contain a small number of holes, the Cardinal Holes, Normal Holes and Multiple Holes functions are of limited use. However, if the designs of two rings are similar, the Copy Ring function allows an existing design to be copied from a string file to the current ring, maintaining relative hole positions and approximate toe spacing.

The Start function allows any number of holes to be graphically positioned, allowing easy manual ring design.

For large scale designs

For ring designs which contain a larger number of holes, the Cardinal Holes, Normal Holes and Multiple Holes functions are of more use. These functions allow a number of holes to be automatically designed at a specified toe spacing and with a specified amount of over-drill or under- drill.

Terminology

Surveyed Openings

The term 'surveyed openings' is used in the Ring Design documentation synonymously with 'drive outline'.

Toe

The term 'toe' or 'toe point' is used in the Ring Design documentation to refer to the point at the end of a hole.

'View-only' holes

'View-only' holes are holes loaded from a string file or Ring Design database which are not allowed to be edited within Ring Design. This includes holes which were drilled in another ring, or which were drilled in the current ring but have been surveyed or edited to lie partially off the current ring plane. These holes are considered to have been drilled and consequently, the hole length, position etc. cannot be edited.

Although 'View-only' holes cannot be edited, they can be charged and the charged interval of these holes can be edited after charging.

Plotting

The format of ring designs saved to string files is:

Each string represents a hole. The first segment of the string represents the hole path, while the second and subsequent segments represent the charged portions of the hole. The toe of each hole is the first point of the first segment of each string. The toe point (end of hole) contains the following information in the description fields:

Description Field	Information
4	Hole ID
5	Hole letter
6	Hole diameter
7	Hole length
8	If a zero pivot offset value is used, the value in this description field will be the distance of the pivot point from the collar position. If a non-zero pivot offset value is used, the value in this description field will be the distance from where the pivot point projects onto the mast, to the collar position.
9	Design stope
10	Design drive
11	Ring number (name)
12	Status (DESIGNED / DRILLED / BLASTED ...)
13	Breakthrough (Y or N)
14	Explosive used for charging If there are multiple charge segments and multiple explosive types, D3 of the individual charge segments should be referred to instead.
15	Explosive sg If there are multiple charge segments and multiple explosive types, D4 of the individual charge segments should be referred to instead.
16	Delay (in ms) If there are multiple charge segments, D5 of the individual charge segments should be referred to instead.
17	Sequence number If there are multiple charge segments, D6 of the individual charge segments should be referred to instead.
18	Angle in plane
19	Dump angle
20	Dump angle direction
21	Pivot number

The description fields of the first point of each charge segment contain the following information:

Description Field	Information
1	Blast number - the ID of the blast this charge segment belongs to ("1" if there is only one charge segment per hole)
2	Charge length
3	Explosive used for charging
4	Explosive sg
5	Delay (in ms)
6	Sequence number

String 32000 contains pivot point information. The description fields of each pivot point contain the following information:

Description Field	Information
4	Pivot number
5	Whether real world coordinates of the file are in YXZ or the first three description fields of each point
6	Offset of the pivot point from the left wall
7	Offset of the pivot point from the right wall
8	Height of the pivot point above the floor
9	Drive centroid Y
10	Drive centroid X
11	Drive centroid Z

String 32001 contains all of the reference points selected for this ring.