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Maptek™, leading software provider to the mining industry, has released Vulcan 8.2 to a global license base of more than 6,000 users.
The new tools, updates and features in Vulcan 8.2 provide the increased speed, efficiency and usability that modern mining demands. An improved software experience complemented 
by a walk-through document, release notes and tutorials has been rolled out.
A customer request for generating strategic pit and dump designs prompted development of the new Rapid Pit Design tool, which has been released in Vulcan 8.2. Mine planning engineers can quickly create mid-bench based designs, and generate phases and reserve reports. With this tool users can evaluate multiple designs in the same amount of time they would traditionally create a single design.
‘The new tool helps engineers to quickly create and analyse different pit designs, allowing them to look at many more alternative designs, prior to producing a final design,’ said Steve Uecker, Vulcan Client Experience Manager.
Vulcan 8.2 includes a new Support Analysis tool for resource validation and forecasting with practical applications in all stages of mining. Users can quickly generate grade tonnage curves at varying scales or material classifications, verify the choice of block size and validate resource block models.
Vulcan 8.2 is equipped with a 256 indexed colour palette with 24 bit colour depth, expanding the selection to more than 16 million colours for CAD objects.
Upgrades to the CSV import option allow users to bring in .CSV files without first creating a template. Updates to the Excel interface in Chronos improve the scheduling workflow.
Following the initial release of Vulcan 64-bit in April, Vulcan 8.2 is available in 32- and 64-bit. Access to the entire 64-bit memory space greatly benefits users working with larger datasets.
Maptek has been delivering more frequent releases to get new functionality into users hands quickly, and encourages users to take advantage of the new tools by upgrading their version with each release.
‘Rigorous internal quality assurance and our customer beta testing program helps to ensure that Vulcan 8.2 combines robust software with a great user experience,’ commented Uecker. ‘We increased test assets by 53 percent for this release and feedback from our beta testers has been very positive overall.’
