Overview
Grid Calc, the Grid Calculator Utility, is a very powerful grid modelling and manipulation tool. It provides both an interactive interface and a sophisticated macro command driven interface. Grid Calc provides facilities to generate grids from irregularly spaced data points. The data points can be from a variety of sources, including ASCII tables, mapfiles, triangulations, design databases, and USGS Digital Elevation Model (DEM) files.
Also included in Grid Calc are fast and sophisticated modelling algorithms to create Inverse Distance, Triangulations, Trend Surfaces, Spline Grid, Least Squares and Kriged gridded surfaces. Powerful grid arithmetic and logical expressions can be combined to build simple and complex grids that may represent such features as:
- Geochemical distributions
- Geophysical surveys representing anomalous regions
- Stratigraphic geology
- Grade thickness models
- Topographic variations
- Contaminant distribution
- Groundwater movement
These modelling tools can be incorporated into system generated macro commands, which will build complex stratigraphic models incorporating both structure and quality parameters. Further to this, detailed horizon splitting and faulting information can be incorporated. From the mine planning perspective, both burden grids and ROM structural and quality grids can be created by Vulcan from a given set of horizons and mining parameters.
In addition to grid arithmetic, Grid Calc offers you a variety of options to manipulate grids, which include scaling, clipping, derivatives, resampling, filters and masking.
Grid Calc is best utilised after database correlations and mapfiles have been generated through Isis (Vulcan's database editing utility) and the Geology > Drilling Utilities and Geology > Drilling Section modules.
