Fractal assessment of the disturbances of phosphate series using lacunarity and succolarity analysis on geoelectrical images (Sidi Chennane, Morocco)

Abstract

In Sidi Chennane phosphate deposit, the disturbances cause serious challenges for the OCP mining engineers during both exploration and the exploitation stages. They are qualified as worst rocky hard to be quantified since they interfere with phosphates series. In this paper, we propose the fractal analysis as a simple efficient tool to quantify the rate of the disturbances by two different methods, namely, the Lacunarity and the Succolarity. The analysis was carried out on eight geoelectrical images of a disturbed area of 50 hectares located in the northern part of Sidi Chennane. The results proved that there is a strong correlation between the disturbances rate and the corresponding fractal value indexes. It appears that the distinction between two disturbed areas is the difference between their corresponding fractal values. This has an important implication to discriminate between the phosphate deposit at high risk of disturbances and the deposit at low risk. The fractal analysis can be thus used as a crucial concept in ranking the prospective zones of phosphate as well as improving the phosphate reserve estimation.