Identification of the Permeable Zones in the Takht-e-Gonbad Copper Mine Using the Flush Return

This research was carried out in Takht-e-Gonbad open pit copper mine in Kerman province, located in 80 km northeast of Sirjan. According to structural geology, this area is located in the Urumieh-Dokhtar Magmatic Arc. This mine is currently in the early years of mineral extraction. The 69 exploration boreholes have been drilled in rock units around the mine pit in which the flush return percentage during drilling were also collected. It is necessary to identify areas with higher permeability in the rock units to design the dewatering plan in the future, so that, geostatistics and simulation methods were used to analyze the flush return. The results of the preliminary statistics show the percentage of the flush return increases with depth. Investigating the spatial continuity of this variable based on the variograms and the spherical model shows that its spatial continuity is about 252 meters, with dominant elongation at the east-west direction. Furthermore, the northeast and southwest portions of the mine are observed to have the largest permeability using the geostatistical simulations by the Gaussian method.