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Dear clients,

A message from Charles E. Fairhurst, CEO, Itasca International, Inc. :

"In this exceptional time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Itasca and its offices worldwide are closely monitoring the situation. While certain Itasca offices may be physically closed due to local conditions and requirements, we are maintaining business operations, including software sales and shipping, as well as timely delivery of ongoing consulting projects. We have implemented measures to ensure our personnel’s safety and will continue to monitor conditions over the coming weeks and months and, following government and public health guidance, will respond proactively. We will provide updates as necessary".

We will continue to keep you informed on any further software developments and consulting projects, and we thank you for your trust and commitment so far.

We hope you are staying healthy and safe.

The European Itasca team

puceConsulting

The Outokumpu Kemi Mine - FLAC3D analysis (Itasca Consultants AB - Sweden)

The Outokumpu Kemi Mine is located in the north of Finland and has an annual production of 2.7 million tonnes of chromite ore. It was started in 1968 and mining was initially conducted in open pits, going underground with sublevel stoping in year 2003. Current mining areas are soon depleted, and mining will continue below current mining area at 500 m depth.
Extraction of the crown pillars between the open pits and the mined areas (that are up to 75 m thick) is one possibility for future mining. The consequences on the pit wall stability and nearby critical infrastructure were studied. The work included data compilation of rock mass and numerical stress analysis in FLAC3D.
The method for mining below 500 m depth is not yet decided, but sublevel caving is suggested. The caveability of the ore and hangingwall, stability of infrastructure during mining, stability of other orebodies, and influence on ground surface were studied. The work included rock mass data compilation, empirical assessment of caveability, numerical stress analysis in FLAC3D, cave flow modelling with CAVESIM.

 

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The Outokumpu Kemi Mine - FLAC3D Model

Modelling flow and transport in fractured rocks, based on DFN approaches- (Itasca Consultants SAS - France)

Itasca Consultants, through its joint R&D laboratory with the University of Rennes and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, collaborates with the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company SKB to develop alternative Discrete Fracture Network based approaches for modelling flow and contaminant transport in crystalline rocks.
In crystalline rocks, flow and transport through the rockmass take place only if there is a connected path of open fractures between hydraulically active boundaries. Hence, the rockmass is represented as a network of discrete fractures (DFN). Flow and transport DFN modelling capacities are implemented in the numerical plateform DFN.lab developed by the joint laboratory. Recently, advective transport modelling has been implemented, based on a particle tracking approach. With this method flow lines can be computed (Figure 1 and Figure 2) and post-processed to derive transport indicators such as breakthrough curves, travel times, tortuosity, transport resistance. The project objective is to assess the risk associated to contaminant transport from deep storage to surface from different DFN models conditioned to available data.

 

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Figure 1: DFN of a few fractures with in-plane heterogeneity of local transmissivity, under permeameter-like hydraulic boundary conditions. Flow field (color scale) and traces from particles flowing through the flow field (black lines).

Figure 2: DFN under dipole  hydraulic conditions. Injection and pumping boreholes (vertical lines) and traces from particles flowing through the flow field colored by local velocities.  

 

puceSoftware

  • Pre-purchase 3DEC 7.0 now!

The pre-release version is already available. We invite you to take a look at the new features on the following page: https://www.itascacg.com/software/whats-new-in-3dec-7

Please contact your local agent to prepurchase 3DEC 7.0!

 

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  • Itasca offers now Web licenses!
Working from home?
Itasca offers now Web licenses available from everywhere via Internet. Web licenses are available for sale for FLAC3D 7.0 and 3DEC 7.0.

Feel free to contact your local office/representative for a quote.

 

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  • FLAC/Slope is now available for free!
FLAC/Slope is a specialized, streamlined version of FLAC for evaluating the factor of safety (FoS) of slopes.

Get your copy here: https://www.itascacg.com/contact-itasca/request-free-flacslope-software
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  • Itasca International Symposium
    (17-20 Feb. 2020)
A successful event!
We want to thank all the participants for having shared their work with our codes.
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Current Updates:

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puceTraining & Seminars

Itasca will host introductory training courses in Europe:

Content
Location
Date
Contact
Webinar on Discrete Element Modeling of Masonry Structures (from Pr. V. Sarhosis) Online From March 26th, 2020 Itasca France
PFC 6.0 training course Ecully, France 2nd quarter 2020 Itasca France

Please visit https://www.itascainternational.com/learning/training for full details or contact directly the office responsible for the training.

For users who envisage the need for substantial amounts of assistance, consulting support or customized training courses are available.
Feel free to contact us if you have specific needs: we adapt our offer to your needs.

puceConferences

Itasca and/or representatives will be attending the following conferences (to be confirmed):

Conference
Date
Place
8th Clay Conference June 8-11, 2020 Nancy, France
JNGG 2020 June 30 - July 2, 2020 Lyon, France
16th IACMAG Torino 2020 July 1-4, 2020 Torino, Italy
AFTES 2020 September 21-23, 2020 Paris, France


Congratulations to Mrs Justine Molron (Itasca France - ENIGMA)
who won the Outstanding Student Presentation Awards at the AGU-100 !
She presented a poster on “A field assessment of the ability of Ground Penetrating Radar to detect fractures in very low permeable crystalline rock“.

puceRecent Publications

Lavoine, E., Davy, P., Darcel, C., & Munier, R. (2020). A Discrete Fracture Network Model With Stress-Driven Nucleation: Impact on Clustering, Connectivity, and Topology. Frontiers in Physics8, 9.

Lavoine, E., Davy, P., Darcel, C., and Le Goc, R.: On the Density Variability of Poissonian Discrete Fracture Networks, with application to power-law fracture size distributions, Adv. Geosci., 49, 77–83, https://doi.org/10.5194/adgeo-49-77-2019, 2019.

Edelbro, C., R. Brummer, M. Pierce, D. Sandström & J. Sjöberg. (2019) "Raiseboring in difficult rock conditions", Ground Support 2019 (Sudbury, October 23–35, 2019). Paper available on-line

 

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