Geotechnical Logging
Geotechnical assessment aims to understand how rock properties affect the mining process. This can include caving and blasting behavior, pit wall and ground support requirements, and monitoring rock behavior. Growing interest in the automation of geotechnical data collection from drill core was the technical driver for Corescan to increase the resolution of the laser profiler in the HCI-4 system and integrate the high-resolution laser profiler into the new CorePhoto-3D system.
Geotechnical data is commonly collected manually from drillcore, which can be both time-consuming and subjective and commonly leads to inconsistent datasets. Automating geotechnical data collection provides an opportunity to capture consistent geotechnical data at a scale that is too time-consuming to achieve via manual data collection. This approach allows technical teams to reduce the time required to collect data and instead allows them to focus on interpreting that data.
The Corescan 3D laser profiling system provides continuous downhole data (even in areas of poor rock quality), therefore, geotechnical data is collected consistently on every meter of drillcore. Even arduous changes, such as the later correction of orientation line locations, can be rolled out across the consistently collected dataset with relative ease. Corescan’s HCI and CorePhoto-3D technology can be used to automatically acquire data used in common geotechnical indices, such as rock quality designation (RQD), rock mass rating (RMR) and tunneling index (Q-Index). The large volumes of consistent geotechnical data produced by Corescan provide an opportunity to increase the data density and the underlying statistical support for rock mass characterization.
For projects with whole (uncut) drillcore, Corescan’s automated geotechnical data collection algorithms feature:
- Improved automated RQD calculations to delineate client-marked mechanical breaks from natural breaks
- Delineate competent core from rubbly/fragmented core
- Automated fracture detection
- Automated fracture orientation*
- Automated fracture spacing/fracture frequency
- Automated fracture roughness
These automations integrate directly into the Corescan software and can be interactively viewed and checked on Coreshed by technical teams.