FEATURE IMPROVING FRAGMENTATION
REGARDLESS OF THE SITE'S GEOLOGICAL CONDITIONS, A PRIMARY KEY TO BLASTING EFFICIENCY IS TO CREATE ENERGY CONFINEMENT.
By Rick Zettler CHALLENGE:
Improving blasting efficiency and performance.
SOLUTION:
Prolonged stemming material confinement.
TIP:
By maintaining energy confinement, explosives can be loaded higher in the borehole to more
uniformly break cap rock.
ating efficiencies to improve their com‐ petitive advantage. One area often analyzed is the blasting program. Nu‐ merous blasting challenges such as cap rock seams, generated vibration levels that are too high and poor muckpile uni‐ formity can be overcome to improve an operation's overall efficiencies.
I
Regardless of the site's geological con‐ ditions, a primary key to improving blasting efficiency is to create energy confinement. The loss of explosive en‐ ergy through stemming ejection re‐ duces the performance of the blast. By
26 ROCKproducts • OCTOBER 2011
n today's challenging economic con‐ ditions, quarries and mines are searching for ways to increase oper‐
improving the stemming material's ef‐ fectiveness in the borehole, the con‐ tained explosives energy within the rock mass will yield a more controlled and efficient blast.
Many emerging technologies have goals of improving blasting efficiencies and performance. Electronic detona‐ tors, for example, have minimized the "cap scatter" associated with tradi‐ tional pyrotechnics, so the blast will perform as designed and improve ag‐ gregate fragmentation. However, most of these technological advances have done nothing to contain explosive en‐ ergy through reduced vertical stem‐ ming ejection.
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