Engineering & Design Philosophy

RSV’s fundamental role is to successfully translate a business process proposition into an operational reality by using suitable engineering solutions.

Key factors in this process include:

- Client engineering, operational, and safety policies, criteria and specifications

- Fit-for-purpose solutions

- Safety, HAZOP, operability, and constructability reviews

- Synergy of industry, client and RSV engineering best practice

- Engineering team competence through the application of the most appropriate resources - available from the client, RSV, affiliates, or a combination of these

- Adherence to RSV and client safety and quality standards including audits, peer reviews and design reviews

- Engineering contextualised in terms of environmental, social and economic realities

Drawing Office Production Facility

RSV’s drawing office facility is controlled by a drawing office manager and staffed with section leaders and designers. We assign "Task force teams" in dedicated drawing offices to large projects.

Mine Design

The physical characteristics and dimensions of an ore body dictate mine design. Although it is not possible to exactly describe these characteristics and dimensions, sophisticated software enables geologists to produce very good approximations from borehole and other field data.

Software application packages allow for the comparison of various designs in order to optimise the economic extraction of ore. These packages, such as Mine2-4D, produce information on tonnage profiles, cash flows and financial indicators such as net present value (NPV) and internal rate of return (IRR) for each design option and allow selection of an optimum design.

This phase of a mining project is relatively inexpensive, but vitally important. Only when a mine design is finalised should work proceed on the feasibility study and implementation phases. There should, ideally, be no changes to the basic optimum design. This is not usually possible, but the effort put into the conceptual and development phases will be in direct relation to the amount of rework required in the implementation phase. Repeating work adds significantly to the costs.

A mine is a complicated engineering construction and requires input from many different disciplines. To ensure that no work is wasted, redone or duplicated, these highly qualified, experienced and expensive specialists must not be involved in the project until all the preliminary investigations are complete.