Determination of specific charge minimizing total unit cost of open pit quarry blasting operations
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Determination of specific charge minimizing total unit cost of open pit quarry blasting operations Abdurrahman Tosun & Gurcan Konak
Received: 8 May 2014 / Accepted: 29 September 2014 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2014
Abstract The value of specific charge in open pit quarry blasting processes considerably affects the efficiency of the blasting. When a high value of specific charge is used in a blasting process, the material resulting from the blasting will have a finer dimension. Costs of explosives and drilling will be increased due to high specific charge value; however, costs of subsequent processes such as loading, hauling, crushing, and boulder crushing will be reduced due to finer dimension of the material. Determination of specific charge value that will minimize total unit costs of the open pit quarry operations will ensure the performance of blasting process in the most economical manner. In this study, certain blast tests have been carried out in three different limestone quarries. Unit costs of explosives, drilling, loading, hauling, crushing, and boulder crushing at each site were determined, and specific charge values minimizing total unit cost of the operations were separately determined for each worksite. Afterward, optimal specific charge values were interrelated according to uniaxial compressive strength values of the rock. Keywords Specific charge . Optimization . The efficiency of loader . The efficiency of hauling . The efficiency of crusher
Introduction The most important parameter that belongs to the blasting operations is the value of specific charge as amount of A. Tosun (*) Bergama Vocational High School, Dokuz Eylul University, Bergama, Izmir, Turkey e-mail: [email protected] G. Konak Department of Mining Engineering, Engineering Faculty, Dokuz Eylul University, Buca, Izmir, Turkey
explosives used per cubic meters. As the value of specific charge increases, dimensions of the resulting particles are reduced. The cost of explosives and drillings is increased with increasing specific charge, while the opposite is true for the loading, hauling, size reduction, and crushing for including boulder amounts in the pile parameters. Therefore, it is very important to examine the effect of specific charge used for drilling-blasting, loading, hauling, crushing, and boulder crushing operations that are the main operations of open pit quarry enterprises and to obtain optimal results. Similar effects of open pit quarry operations are seen in Fig. 1 (Eloranta 2006). Drilling capacity of drilling machine for drilling and accordingly fuel consumption values will vary according to specific charge values. The drilling machine will drill more holes at high specific charge values, and this situation will increase the fuel consumption of the drilling machine. Parameters determining the loading performance can be defined as filling factor of the scoop, cycle period of the loader, and the fuel consumption of the loader. For example, the loader will be forced more in a blasted pile c
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