  Block caving is an ore extraction technique used in the copper mines of
Chile. It uses gravity to ease the breaking of rocks, and to facilitate the
extraction from the mine of the resulting mixture of ore and waste. To simulate
this extraction process numerically and better understand its impact on the
mine environment, we study 3 variational models for damage, based on the
gradient damage model of Pham and Marigo (2010). In these models, the damage
criterion may exhibit an anisotropic dependence on the spherical and deviatoric
parts of the stress tensor. We report simulations that satisfactorily represent
the expected evolution of the stress field in a block caving operation.
