ABSTRACT
The global mining market has become increasingly competitive and as a result design engineers are constantly striving to reduce the overall mining costs. In the open pit mining industry, this translates to an excavation of the steepest possible slope angles that would result in the lowest stripping ratio while ensuring maximum ore recovery. Achieving the steepest slope angles often starts with optimizing the bench design as this is the building block of any open pit geotechnical slope design. The DFN approach is perhaps one such method that has been identified to produce more realistic or optimal pit slope designs. This paper presents a case study in South Africa that illustrates the application of discrete fracture networks to the design of open pit benches. The results of this case study would suggest that the DFN approach using FracMan produces more optimal slope designs as compared to the traditional deterministic and pseudo-probabilistic methods (Kuppusamy, 2020).
