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Keywords: The flow behavior of the ore and waste significantly affect the dilution in sublevel caving (SLC) mines. Drill and
Blast-induced fragmentation blast issues are identified as having a substantial impact upon SLC material flow. In the paper, blast-induced
Sublevel caving fragmentation in SLC was numerically investigated using the LS-DYNA code. A method was presented to eval-
Numerical modelling uate fragmentation based on the damage description and a fragment identification routine implemented in the
LS-PREPOST (a pre- and post-processing tool of LS-DYNA). The effects of the delay time and the primer position
on fragmentation were investigated. The results indicated that a long delay time gives a finer fragmentation for
the cases discussed in the paper. The results also showed that the middle primer and the top primer in SLC can
give a fine fragmentation. The limitations of numerical modelling were also discussed.
⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: changping.yi@ltu.se (C. Yi).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tust.2017.05.030
Received 19 December 2016; Received in revised form 15 May 2017; Accepted 31 May 2017
Available online 03 June 2017
0886-7798/ © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
C. Yi et al. Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 68 (2017) 167–173
Fig. 1. (a) Geometry of the SLC model and (b) the charge pattern and the initiation se-
quence.
Fig. 2. (a) The borehole pattern in the model and (b) the borehole pattern of the
and rock mass dislocation and damage in front of these holes.
Malmberget mine.
Despite blasting is important for the flow behavior of the ore and
waste material, it is not well understood how the blasting design and
w ⎞ −R1 V w ⎞ −R2 V wE
parameters influence the fragmentation in SLC and therefore ore re- p = A ⎛1−⎜ e ⎟ + B ⎛1− ⎜e + ⎟
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C. Yi et al. Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 68 (2017) 167–173
Fig. 3. Stress limit surfaces and loading scenario in the RHT model (after
Borrvall and Riedel (2011)).
3. Fragmentation evaluation method value in the range 0–1, if x is less than Xmax. Xmax is the maximum
fragment size and X50 is the median fragment size. a, b and c are con-
The fragmentation is one of the important indicators to evaluate the stants.
blast performance. In order to evaluate the fragmentation it is necessary The numerical results for fragment area distribution and the fitting
to be able to distinguish between cracked rock and undamaged rock. It curve with Swebrec function are shown in Fig. 5. By using this method,
is not possible to explicitly model the crack formation and propagation it is possible to study the accumulated area for different fragment areas.
in the type of finite element model used here. In this paper, an alter- The accumulated area plot should resemble the mass passing plot
native approach was used to evaluate the fragmentation. The block (“sieve curves”) which is commonly used in fragmentation analysis.
shown in Fig. 4(a) is chosen as an evaluation object. After the calcu-
lation, the damage distribution in this block is shown in Fig. 4(b). In
4. Discussion
this study, a damage level of 0.6 was taken as the limit where the rock is
considered to be fully crushed. Then the elements with damage level
4.1. Effect of delay time on fragmentation
above 0.6 were blanked out to form cracks in the rock mass. The crack
pattern is shown in Fig. 4(c). It is not easy to identify the fragments in
In practice, the initiation sequence of boreholes in sublevel caving
3D, but it is straightforward in 2D. A cross-section shown in Fig. 4(a) is
mines is one by one and the delay time is 25 ms usually (Zhang, 2005).
chosen to be evaluated about the fragment area in this cross-section.
But for finite element modelling of blasting, elements get very distorted
The crack pattern of this cross-section is shown in Fig. 4(d). Next, an
due to particle movement if the simulation time is long, which even-
algorithm was developed and a routine was implemented in LS-PRE-
tually can stop the simulation. In the present paper, three cases for
POST, in which fragments delineated by cracks (=fully crushed ele-
delay times of 0 ms, 1 ms and 2 ms were modeled. The purpose is to
ments) were identified, and the area of each such fragment was de-
study the effect of delay time on fragmentation. The simulation time
termined. Then it is possible to evaluate the fragment area by
was 20 ms for the cases with simultaneous initiation and 1 ms delay
measuring the fragments in a number of cuts through the model.
time. The case with 2 ms delay time had a simulation time of 25 ms. In
After the fragment area was calculated, some area sizes which re-
order to evaluate the blast performance in each case, one block and one
semble the sieve mesh sizes were defined to obtain size intervals for
cross-section of this block were selected for evaluation, see Fig. 4(a).
different fragment areas. Then the extended Swebrec function
The damage distribution of the case of 1 ms delay after blasting is
(Ouchterlony, 2009) was employed to fit the fragment area distribu-
shown in Fig. 6. The crack pattern of this case is shown in Fig. 7. The
tion. The function is
back view in Figs. 6 and 7 is the view of the cross-section where the
P (x ) = 1/{1 + a [ln(x max / x )/ln(x max / x50 )]b boreholes are located at.
The fragmentation of the chosen cross-section for different delay
+ (1−a)[(x max /x −1)/(x max /x50−1)]c } (2)
times is shown in Fig. 8. Fig. 8 indicates that the fragments in the lower
where P(x) is a cumulative distribution function and may take any part of the ring are fine. One possible reason is that the specific charge
Table 2
RHT model parameters for Westerly Granite.
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C. Yi et al. Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 68 (2017) 167–173
Fig. 4. (a) The evaluated block and a selected cross-section; (b) Damage distribution after blasting; (c) Crack pattern after blasting; (d) Fragments at the chosen cross-section.
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C. Yi et al. Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 68 (2017) 167–173
subsection. They are the top primer case and the bottom primer case.
Here the top primer means that the primer is located at the borehole toe
while the bottom primer means that the primer is located at the lowest
of the charge. The delay time was set as 1 ms.
The fragmentation of the chosen cross-section for different cases are
shown in Fig. 10. Fig. 10 shows that there are some boulders which are
(a) Front view (b) Back view close to the roof of drift and at the middle of the ring for the bottom
Fig. 7. Overall crack pattern for the 1 ms delay time case. primer case. Fig. 10 also indicates that the cases of middle primer and
top primer can give a fine fragmentation compared to the case of
the case of 2 ms delay leads to the finest fragmentation. bottom primer. The fragment area distribution shown in Fig. 11 also
confirm this conclusion. Fig. 11 also indicates that the top priming and
the middle priming have the similar fragment area distribution at the
4.2. Effect of primer positions on fragmentation
chosen cross-section. Fig. 10 indicates the fragmentation nearby the
upper boundary is fine for the cases of bottom primer and middle
Previous research has shown that the blast performance is influ-
primer compared to the top primer case. It could be because the stress
enced by the position of the primer. Generally, for bench blasting,
wave propagates upward in the first two cases and reflects at the upper
bottom priming gives the maximum use of explosive energy, increasing
boundary while the stress wave propagates downward in the top primer
fragmentation and displacement of the rock with a minimum of fly rock
case. It can be observed that the fragmentation of the region which is
(Jimeno et al., 1995). Some researchers stated that borehole toe
close to the drift roof for the top primer case is finer than that of the
priming also gives the maximum use of explosive energy and increasing
cases of bottom primer and middle primer.
fragmentation for SLC blasting (Xue et al., 2001; Wang, 2003). The
advantages and disadvantages of lowest primer position were in-
vestigated by Zhang (2005) in the Malmberget mine, Sweden. Nowa- 4.3. Limitations of the numerical modelling
days, the primers are placed at the middle of the borehole, at 15 m
distance from the borehole collar. The results from production show Blasting induces large deformation until failure in the medium.
that the fragmentation is much better than before and the average ore Currently the RHT material model in LS-DYNA only support Lagrangian
extraction is increased by 107%, compared with that from the lowest algorithm. The elements based on Lagrangian algorithm will be dis-
primer position scheme in the same drifts (Zhang, 2005). torted because of large deformation, which can stop the modelling
The cases of middle primer have been investigated in the above early. The delay times in the modelling cases are short to finish the
subsection. In order to investigate the influence of the primer position modelling before the elements are distorted. It is possible to run some
on the blast performance in SLC, two more cases were studied in this long delay time cases if the RHT material model in LS-DYNA supports
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C. Yi et al. Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 68 (2017) 167–173
seen that the maximum fragment area is around 80 m2. It is too big for
realistic fragments resulted from blasting. It is because of the limitation
of the subroutine implemented in LS-PREPOST code. One of the main
issues when doing the fragment size identification is how to handle
“bridge” elements which connect two adjacent fragments, see Fig. 12.
These “bridge” elements could close the gap between two adjacent
fragments and yield a fragment which is very large compared to the
individual fragments. In the fragment size identification routine, if an
element has two opposing sides that are not connected to an element,
this is considered to be a “bridge” element and is cancelled out, see Area
I in Fig. 12. The identification routine takes the fragments near Area I as
two fragments. However, if the elements connect two fragments like the
elements in Area II, see Fig. 12(a), the identification routine takes the
Fig. 11. Accumulated area plot for different primer positions. fragments near Area II as one large fragment, which is one of possible
reasons why the maximum fragment area is greater than 80 m2 some-
Eulerian algorithm or Arbitrary-Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) algorithm in times.
the future.
As mentioned earlier, It is not possible to explicitly model the blast-
5. Conclusion
induced fragmentation in the type of finite element model because it is
a continuum-based modelling. An alternative approach was proposed in
In the present study, the simulations for blasting in SLC were carried
this paper to make an attempt to form cracks in rock mass based on
out based on finite element modelling. A method was presented to
damage description and then analyze the fragmentation in 2D by using
evaluate blast-induced fragmentation. Numerical results indicate that
a routine implemented in LS-PREPOST code. The drawback of the
the long delay time gives a finer fragmentation for the cases studied in
method is that it is mesh size dependent and it is not possible to de-
the paper. It should be noted that only three short delay time cases were
termine fragments less than the element size due to the limited level of
investigated because of the limitation of numerical modelling. More
discretization.
cases should be studied to optimize the delay time for SLC blasting. The
From the fragment size distribution figures such as Fig. 11, it can be
results also indicate that the bottom priming induces a coarse
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fragmentation. The fragment size identification routine needs im- Underground Mining Methods Handbook. Society for Mining. Metallurgy, and
Exploration, Inc., Littleton, pp. 621–654.
provement to identify fragments better. Kvapil, R., 1992. Sublevel caving. In: Hartman, H.L. (Ed.), SME Mining Engineering
Handbook. Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Explorations, New York, pp.
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