International Journal of
Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijrmms
A R T I C L E I N F O
Keywords:
Numerical simulation
Blasting
Short delays
Fragmentation
1. Introduction questionable. Schill and Sjöberg12 studied the influence of delay times
on the blasting effect in a two-hole model with the LS-DYNA13 code and
Blasting techniques are widely employed in mining in order to concluded that there was an effect of interacting stress waves. However,
fragment rock mass into smaller pieces to facilitate subsequent handling this effect was local around the interaction plane, implying that very
(mucking, haulage, crushing, etc.). Short delay blasting techniques can short delay will not generate a dramatic increase in fragmentation
improve fragmentation compared to simultaneous initiation, but the contrary to what was proposed by Rossmanith et al.5,6 The results of
optimum delay time for blasting is still under discussion. The optimum Schill and Sjöberg12 also indicated that longer delay times (in which the
delay time to improve fragmentation has been studied by e.g. Tatsuya stress wave would have passed the neighboring boreholes) also resulted
et al.,1 Aldas et al.,2 Shi and Chen3 and Petropoulos et al.,4 but different in improved fragmentation. The quantitative results of stress wave in-
conclusions were obtained. teraction between two adjacent boreholes were analytically and nu-
With the application of electronic detonators and with short delay merically investigated by Yi et al.14 The analytical model based on the
times, a hypothesis of achieving improved fragmentation through stress assumptions used by Rossmanith et al.5,6 was compared with a nu-
wave interaction has been proposed by Rossmanith et al.5,6 In these merical model in LS-DYNA and the results were not consistent.
papers, a model was proposed to describe the stress wave interaction In the present paper, a four-hole model was built to study the pos-
between adjacent boreholes with Lagrange diagrams, which reveals sible effect of overlapping negative tails by using the 3D finite element
how a positive effect of the interaction of the stress waves could be method. A method was presented to form fragments based on finite
achieved with the assumption of an infinitely long charge length. With element modeling results and damage concepts. An approach was
the inspiration of Rossmanith and co-workers, Vanbrabant and Espi- proposed to evaluate blast-induced fragmentation based on numerical
nosa7 stated that the delay times to match an overlap of the negative results.
tail of the particle velocity can improve fragmentation. They conducted
a series of field tests and claimed that the average fragmentation im- 2. Model and materials
proved by nearly 50%. Chiappetta8 also claimed that the very short
delays between holes, such as 2 ms, help to improve blast perfor- A four-borehole model was constructed to model the field tests. The
mances. However, there are different opinions. Blair9 stated that the model geometry and the sizes are shown in Fig. 1. The borehole diameter
delay time and initiation accuracy are not typical governing factors for is 310 mm. The depth of the borehole is 16 m, the length of subdrilling is
blast performances. Johansson and Ouchterlony10 investigated the in- 1 m and the length of stemming is 5 m. The green part in the model
fluence of delay time on the fragmentation with a series of small-scale geometry was selected to be evaluated after blasting. The model is dis-
tests. Their results showed no distinct differences in fragmentation cretized with hexahedral elements. The element size of the green part is 6
when there were shockwave interactions compared to no shockwave × 6 × 6 cm while the element size of the yellow part is 12 × 12 ×
interaction. The investigation of Katsabanis et al.11 indicated that se- 12 cm. The green part and the yellow part are connected with transition
lecting a very short delay time for fragmentation optimization is elements. The total number of elements is approximately 23 million.
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: changping.yi@ltu.se (C. Yi).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijrmms.2017.10.026
Received 2 May 2016; Received in revised form 14 March 2017; Accepted 23 October 2017
1365-1609/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Yi et al. International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences 100 (2017) 250–254
Fig. 1. Geometry of the four-borehole model. (For interpretation of the references to color Table 1
in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this article). RHT model parameters for rock mass in Lagrangian elements.
Table 2
Parameters for rock mass and stemming in Eulerian elements.
251
C. Yi et al. International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences 100 (2017) 250–254
Fig. 4. Overall damage distribution and crack pattern for the 3 ms delay time case.
4. Model results and discussion
preparing input data for LS-DYNA and processing the results from LS- Four inter-hole delay cases were modeled in the paper. The inter-
DYNA analyses and in which fragments delineated by cracks were hole delay times were 0 ms, 1 ms, 3 ms and 6 ms respectively. When the
identified, and the area of each such fragment was determined. A delay time is 6 ms, there is no interaction of stress waves from adjacent
number of 2D cuts were selected to be evaluated and the area of each boreholes according to the stress wave speed in the rock mass. The
fragment at the cut calculated with the routine. After the fragment area initiation sequence is from right to left. The simulations of the 0 ms
was calculated, some area sizes resembling the sieve mesh sizes were delay case and the 1 ms delay case were run to 15 ms. The simulation of
defined to obtain intervals for different fragment areas. Then the ex- the 3 ms delay case was run to 18 ms and the simulation of the 6 ms
tended Swebrec function21 was employed to fit the fragment area dis- delay case was run to 25 ms. Six cuts (cross-sections) were selected to
tribution. The function is be evaluated (Fig. 6). Fig. 7 presents the overall crack pattern of the
case of 0 ms delay time. Because the delay time is 0 ms, it appears that
P (x ) = 1/{1 + a [ ln(x max / x )/ ln(x max / x50)] b+ (1 − a)[(x max / x − 1)/(x max / x50 − 1)]c } the results are symmetric. Fig. 8 presents a horizontal cut just above the
(2) explosives. The results show that the fragmentation is fine around the
boreholes and near the free face. This is due to the high pressure and
where P(x) is a cumulative distribution function and may take any quick unloading process of the blast load around the boreholes and the
value in the range 0–1, if x is less than xmax, where xmax is the maximum effect of the reflected tensile stress waves from the free face. The radial
fragment size and x 50 is the median fragment size, and a, b and c are cracks and the hoop cracks are also obvious, which is consistent with
constants. For instance, the fragmentation of one cross-section of the the experimental results.22 The fragment area distribution curves for
model in Fig. 4 is shown in Fig. 5(a). The fragment area distribution and the 0 ms delay case show that the fragmentation at the cuts near the
the fitting curve are shown in Fig. 5(b). borehole is finer than the cuts at the middle of two adjacent boreholes
Using this method it is possible to study the accumulated area for (Fig. 9).
different fragment areas and compare the fragmentation between dif- According to the concept of Vanbrabant and Espinosa,8 cuts X22
ferent cross-sections and simulations. The accumulated area plot is and X32 are the most interesting cuts because they are certain that the
constructed to resemble a mass passing (or “sieve curves”) which are stress waves meet and interact in the 0 ms delay case. If the negative
commonly used in the blasting community to evaluate fragmentation. tails of the stress waves overlap at the area between the second bore-
hole and the fourth borehole with very short delay time such as 1 ms
and 3 ms, the fragmentation at Cut X22 and Cut X32 should be finer
than the case that there is no stress wave interaction because of the long
delay time such as 6 ms. For cut X22, the finest fragmentation is found
in the simulation with 6 ms delay (Fig. 10). There is no interaction of
stress waves when the delay time is 6 ms, which indicates that there are
other factors rather than stress wave interaction that affect the frag-
mentation the most.
Fig. 5. (a) Fragmentation at the chosen cross-section; (b) Fragment area distribution and
the fitting curve with Swebrec function. Fig. 8. Horizontal cut of fragmented region.
252
C. Yi et al. International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences 100 (2017) 250–254
Fig. 9. Accumulated area plot for the case of 0 ms delay time. 0ms delay 1ms delay 3ms delay 6ms delay
Fig. 14. Median and oversize vs. Delay time (after Petropoulos et al.5).
The accumulated area plot for Cut X32 is shown in Fig. 11. The
finest fragmentation is found for the simulation with the 3 ms delay
time case, and the 6 ms delay time case yields the second finest frag-
trucks carrying the ore and were later analyzed to obtain the frag-
mentation.
mentation for each bench and the results are shown in Fig. 14.
Figs. 10 and 11 show that 3 ms and 6 ms delay time can improve
The tests showed that the inter-hole delay time of 3 ms resulted in
fragmentation compared to simultaneous initiation, but very short
the finest fragmentation among all benches; all examined values i.e.
delay time such as 3 ms and 1 ms cannot ensure finer fragmentation
x50, x80 and xmax showed improvements upon other benches. Compared
than the long delay time such as 6 ms. The fragments at Cut X32 with
to reference trials, the 3 ms delay yielded 10% finer fragmentation. The
different delay times are shown in Fig. 12.
improvement was not as significant as stated by Rossmanith5 and
Vanbrabant and Espinosa.7 However, the crushing energy of the ore
5. Field test results from this trial was the highest among all.
Two trials with 1 ms inter-hole delay time did not result in any
To test the hypothesis that very short delay time could improve significant variation compared to reference benches. The difference in
fragmentation, a series of field tests have been performed at the Aitik x50 values were ignorable, the same is true for crushing energy of the
open pit mine by Petropoulos et al.4 A total number of six benches were mentioned trials.
assigned for trials with different inter-hole delay times. Two of the The bench with inter-hole delay time of 6 ms resulted in the lowest
benches were blasted with pyrotechnic caps with 42 ms delay time and crushing energy among other trials. However, the bench gave more
were used as references for further comparisons. Two benches were boulders and coarser fragmentation compared to reference benches.
blasted with 1 ms of inter-hole delay time by use of electronic deto- It should be noted that different specific charges were used in these
nators. Two other benches were also blasted by electronic detonators, field trials. For instance, the specific charge is 1.07 kg/m3 for the 3 ms
but with 3 ms and 6 ms of inter-hole delay time respectively. One of the delay case while it is 1.0 kg/m3 for the 6 ms delay case. Authors4
test benches is shown in Fig. 13. Image analysis was used to analyze the concluded that specific charge was found dominant over the delay time
fragmentation of the rock after blasts. A series of images were shot from regarding fragmentation.
253
C. Yi et al. International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences 100 (2017) 250–254
254