Designing of Surface Blasts - A Computational Approach

Abstract

A major part of mineral production comes from surface mining and there has been a rapid growth in this sector with the deployment of high capacity equipment .Increased production can be achieved from large capacity surface mines using heavy earth moving machineries. These machineries involve high capital cost, and thus, the mining engineers should plan to achieve the best performance from these machineries. Performance of them, especially the excavating and transporting equipments are largely depending on the blast results, particularly, fragment size, distribution and muck profile. Thus, proper blast design with a computational approach is a vital factor that affects the cost of the entire mining activities.