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The Bench Depletion stepallows users to deal with remnant material that is leftover from the depletion surface. This step deals with the depleted Phase Solid and the flitches within it. If a phase does not incorporate flitch mining, the flitch level will equal the bench level. Material from flitches can either be removed or sent down; sending material up is not an option.
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Defining Areas
CAD tools
Areas within the filch to be reallocated need to be defined by a closed polygon that can be created using the CAD tools in the viewport toolbar.
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The CAD tools are found in various other steps within Rapid Reserver and behave in the same manner, except for two buttons, Generate Ramp Shots and Add Contours (see here).
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the Add Contours button.
Adding Contours tool
The Add Contours feature can be used to generate a construction line around contour sections that are below a defined height.
A closed polygon can then be created by using this generated line and other CAD tools. The resultant polygons can then be removed or pushed down to the bench below.
Using Add Contour function to generate a contour line along a bench with rough edges:  | Use standard CAD tools to close a polygon:  |
Z-Plane and Thickness slider
To aid with identifying areas of interest, on the left-hand side of the main viewport a vertical slider bar is provided. This slider acts on the Z-plane and can be used to highlight areas that are below a certain thickness.
Slider’s view changes from Z-Plane to Thickness depending on viewport display angle.
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The colours colors for highlighting areas above and below the thickness height can be reviewed and changed to suit users preferences in the Legend panel.
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The EstCon (estimated contour) column provides users with a high-level estimate on whether or not remnant material may be present within a flitch.
This number is not used anywhere else within the software and is by no means accurate. The higher the number, the higher the change there is material that needs attention.
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In the Remove column you can flag some benches/flitches to exclude them from the further workflow. In the example below, the whole bench at 800RL has a remnant material less than 1m thick and can be fully removed.
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Bench Silhouettes
It is important to understand, that the benches dealt with in Bench Depletion are based on the Depleted Phase Solids, not the Original Phase Solid. This means that material sent to the flitch below will be trimmed by the silhouette of the receiving flitch. A simple example of the behaviour is shown below.
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