Statement of problem

Rock fragmentation is one of the important stages of blasting operations and the results are
looked at carefully in any mining operations. A very good blast design in a blasting operation
will yield an optimal fragmentation size that will be environmentally friendly, safe, and
economical for any mine. On the other hand, a poorly designed blast will result in a poor
fragmentation size and a negative impact on the environment (property damage and noise
pollution). A poor fragmentation size will also have an impact on production, cost, maintenance,
and crusher throughput.
A good fragmentation size distribution is important in a successful mining venture and a good
maintenance record; hence, it is important to have a uniform distribution to avoid oversize
(boulders) and under-size(fines). Therefore, analyzing the blast pattern before and after the
blasting operation will be important.
Drilling and blasting is the first unit operation in the mining cycle that is important to all other
unit operations in terms of cost. A good design blast will give a desirable fragmentation size
which will give the loading equipment higher productivity thereby reducing the cost of moving a
ton of materials from the pit to the waste dump, crusher, and/or stockpile. Under the same
condition, there will be a higher truck production rate because of the faster shovel loading rate.
This will also reduce the cycle time for shovels and trucks.
To achieve all of the above mentioned, there is a need to have a predictive fragmentation size
model which can be looked at as mining operations proceed.

The case is with the mining operation done by Mittal Steel Liberia, an iron ore mining company
operating in northern Liberia.
Currently, there is no predictive model/method used by blast designers to predict the
fragmentation size before or after blast. Having predictive models/methods will give the blast
engineer a comparative insight on how to design a blast for (the mine and the quarry) that will
yield the optimum fragmentation size which will be economical, safe, and environmentally
friendly as phase two of the operation is on the way. The use of machine learning
methods/models to develop a predictive model will be good for the company to address the
above problem.