Geovariances: Where no one has gone before

By Jorge Fernandes, Geologist - Votorantim Metais
July 2009

Votorantim Metais is among the world’s ten largest producers of zinc and the Latin America’s largest producer of nickel electrolytic, and Brazil’s third largest producer of structural steel.

"Our greatest issue is that we work with very large database spread on large areas and usually our block models exceed 15 km. We need a user-friendly software which allows us to perform accurate and advanced geostatistical analysis of our data, and which allows us to quickly get the results.

The only software package that meets these expectations is ISATIS for the following reasons:

• its interface is user friendly,
• data can easily be imported in/exported from our usual mining package,
• it allows us to run from simple to advanced geostatistical methods in one single package.

Since the acquisition of ISATIS, we have been using it for geostatistical analysis and we really appreciate its quickness and efficiency. For example, we are now in the position to build and adjust variograms in a very few minutes only!

The most useful tool of the software is the multicore capacity that in some cases makes the process very fast. For example, an ordinary kriging from an area of more than 250 million blocks (Figure 1) was up to 50x faster! We can also easily perform risk analysis running many simulations very fast too!

Figure 1 - Block model with large dimensions

Another very outstanding tool is the 3D Viewer in 64-bit version. We can now see data in 3D with a resolution we never had with the other software we used. For example, we can now visualize images in 3D that sometimes require more than 15GB of memory (Figures 2, 3, 4).

Figure 2 - Topography in high resolution, obtained with laser methods

Figure 3 - Topography in high resolution, obtained with laser methods and body of ore

Figure 4 - Topography in high resolution, obtained with laser methods, body of ore and final pit project

ISATIS flexibility and quickness allow us to spend more time in geological interpretation. It’s worth the investment."