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Modelling the Impact of Rockmass and Blast Design Variation on Blast Fragmentation

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Abstract

Most blast fragmentation models assume the rock mass properties, explosive properties and blast design variables to be constants and uniformly distributed within a blast.  However, in reality all these input variables vary within a blast resulting in variation in the resulting fragmentation size distribution.  A stochastic modelling approach is introduced in this paper to quantify this variation.  This technique take the input variables as statistical distributions rather than constants and through several thousand iterations, generates a statistical representation of the expected fragmentation resulting from a production blast.  A case stucy of three production blasts from a large open pit mine are presented and the modelled fragmentation "envelope" shows good agreement with the fragmentation "envelope" estimated from Split image analysis.

The various blast-related parameters influence different parts of the fragmentation distribution, eg. rock strength and explosive velocity of detonation have most impact on fines.  The technique is used to identify the parameters that have the greatest influence on various size fractions.  Such an analysis will be useful to direct resources to efficiently minimise the variation.
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