Development of recovery domains: Examples from the Prominent Hill IOCG deposit, Australia

• Investigating new methods and concepts for predictive recovery.
• Outputs that are suitable for geometallurgical modelling.
• Mineralogical and textural information based models.
• Models can be used for creation of geometallurgical recovery domains.
• Domains can be used in planning for mining, mineral processing and scheduling.

New methods and concepts for recovery domaining with outputs that are suitable for geometallurgical modelling are being investigated. In the work reported here, mineralogical and textural information obtained for drill core samples by a combination of techniques has been investigated to develop models for predicting recovery. The simplest and cheapest method involves assay data only and gives predicted results with ∼±4% RMS error. Since this model involves only assay data it could be used to predict Cu recovery values for the remainder of the deposit. The predicted Cu recovery values can be used to rank samples and divide the deposit into recovery domains that are suitable for integration into the planning process for mining, mineral processing and scheduling.