ARPHA Proceedings 7: 128-135, doi: 10.3897/ap.7.e0128

Effect of Stemming Parameters on Blast-Induced Rock Fragmentation: A Case Study

Mohamed Fredj, Riadh Boukarm, Abderrazak Saadoun, Kamel Menacer, Radouane Nakache

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Fredj M, Boukarm R, Saadoun A, Menacer K, Nakache R (2024) Effect of Stemming Parameters on Blast-Induced Rock Fragmentation: A Case Study. ARPHA Proceedings 7: 128-135. https://doi.org/10.3897/ap.7.e0128

Abstract

The size of rock fragmentation plays an important role in the economic efficiency of surface mining operations. It directly affects the costs associated with drilling, blasting, loading, and crushing. This study aims to explore the influence of blast design factors such as blast hole length, stemming length (SL), and powder factor on rock fragmentation in a limestone quarry. Digital Image Analysis (DIA) was employed to determine the mean fragment sizes (MFS-X50) and maximum fragment size (MaxFS-X80) of the rock. Following each blast, several images of the entire muck pile were captured during the loading stages and subjected to fragmentation analysis using WipFrag software. The results obtained reveal that the optimal rock fragment size (MFS-X50, and MaxFS-X80) of rocks depends strongly on both blast design parameters and explosive factors.

Keywords

Stemming, blasting, fragmentation analysis, digital image processing, limestone quarry, rock fragment size