Optimization of Blasting Parameters in Opencast Mines

Drilling and blasting are the major unit operations in opencast mining. Inspite of the best efforts to introduce mechanization in the opencast mines, blasting continue to dominate the production. Therefore to cut down the cost of production optimal fragmentation from properly designed blasting pattern has to be achieved. Proper adoption of drilling and blasting can contribute significantly towards profitability and therefore optimization of these parameters is essential. The blast optimization model has been developed with simple methodologies which can be adopted by the mining industry to compare the explosive costs, the model developed is a user friendly one, since by keeping the powder factor and number of choices of explosives available as constant and by varying the parameters like drill hole diameter, number of holes and cost of explosives one can compare the explosive performance and accordingly take a decision to select the proper type of explosives for blasting. It may be noted, that the model has been developed based on case studies of three different mines of MCL, and it can be modified with collection of information from a large number of mines.