The Potential for Unifying Drilling, Blasting and Downstream Operations by the Application of Technology

摘要

Many new technologies, useful to the mining and quarrying have recently come to market. Some are applicable to drilling and blasting operations. Others apply to subsequent mining unit operations and can generate data for objective assessment of blasting results. These new technologies can accurately capture the information component of blasthole drilling, and indeed of each unit operation. Knowledge can be extracted from this information and passed forward and back through the mining system to improve operations and factually assess results. This leads to an evolving and improving system. Drilling and blasting are the first unit operations of mining. Therefore, these efforts impact many other subsequent activities. The ability to use information generated during the conduct of these operations, and to provide feedback loops for factual assessment is important to obtaining drilling and blasting results that best meet the needs of the operation. In this paper, a number of technologies that can favorably impact drilling and blasting are presented. These advances can provide a way to unify drilling, blasting and blast design. Other technologies are discussed that provide ways to quantitatively assess blasting results throughout the mining system. These can provide feedback loops to drilling and blasting. The possibility of setting quantitative fragmentation goals for the operation by being able to objectively measure results at various points in the miming cycle is presented. It will be possible to relate energy consumption in mining operations to fragmentation size distributions. The feasibility of managing energy consumption in the various unit operations of mining, to achieve the least total energy expenditure is discussed.