Applying simple mathematical models in the mining and energy industries

Speaker: Jason Furtney, Itasca International

In this talk I hope to show how I applied what I learned at the IEEF in my career as a consulting engineer. Of particular utility to me has been the idea of breaking a complex engineering problem into small tractable pieces. I am obliged to briefly introduce my company, Itasca International, and the type of work we do. I will show three examples: Potash is a water soluble rock made of potassium salts, it is economically important because its use as a fertilizer. In North America, potash is solution mined by circulating water that dissolves the rock. This is a rich problem that involves chemistry, fluid flow, heat transfer, and geomechanics.

I will demonstrate some models that are used to help design solution mines, forecast production, and diagnose operational problems. Explosives are an inexpensive means to break and move rock for civil purposes like tunneling, road cut development, and open pit mine excavation. Rock blasting is a complex set of processes that span several orders of magnitude in time-scale, length-scale, and stress magnitude. I will describe some simple mathematical and numerical models that have helped understand blasting. Onshore wind energy is rapidly growing in the United States, partially as a consequence of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. During construction, the world’s largest mobile cranes are used to lift the nacelle and blades of turbines. There have been several high profile cases of these large cranes tipping over and being destroyed during construction. It is 2025, so every talk has to have something about machine learning now: I will describe the technical problem of soil bearing capacity failure and show how machine learning, via the concept of a surrogate model, has helped make wind turbine installation faster, safer, and less expensive.

Bio: Jason Furtney was a student at the IEEF from 2002 to 2006 after studying Geology at Edinburgh University. Since leaving the institute, Jason has been working as a consulting engineer for Itasca International, a geomechanics consulting and software company in Minneapolis, Minnesota.