STUDIES ON INCREASING THE EFFICIENCY OF DRILLING AND BLASTING PROCESSES IN OPEN-PIT MINING AT MINING ENTERPRISES

This paper describes the application of geologic modeling-adapted sampling to improve operating costs and efficiency, and productivity in drilling and blasting processes in some mining operations. The objectives are to reduce the number of blast holes drilled and accidental access to the geologic boundary of interest. These goals come from an economic point of view, since the cost, firstly, is directly proportional to the number of drill holes, and secondly, it is related to the efficiency of recovery of the target material associated with excavation and blast damage.

Therefore, problem formulation is an incentive to learn more about lithology and drill less.

A major problem in creating an accurate surface model is that the sedimentary rock mass is usually coarsely sampled by drilling widely spaced exploratory holes. Thus, interpolation does not adequately capture local variations in the underlying geology. With the recent advent of consistent and reliable real-time detection of geologic boundaries in the field using borehole measurement data, we posed the problem of local model estimation in an adaptive sampling system.