Empress Catherine II Saint-Petersburg Mining University, Saint-Petersburg, Russia

A. P. Gospodarikov, Head of a Department, Doctor of Engineering Sciences, Professor, kafmatem@spmi.ru
V. N. Kovalevskiy, Candidate of Engineering Sciences, Associate Professor

V. I. Kirilenko, Post-Graduate Student

Gipronickel Institute, Saint-Petersburg, Russia
A. E. Rumyantsev, Head of a Laboratory, Candidate of Engineering Sciences

In recent years, mining companies vigorously promote a concept connected with the substantiation of optimum parameters of rock mass to ensure the minimum integrated cost. The main difficulty in this concept is that the influence of such parameters is nonlinear in nature, and determination of the required functional connections is not only a scientific challenge but also dictates mobilization of considerable production resources. The analysis of the drilling and blasting weight points at the lack of a unified and sufficiently substantiated procedure for a blasting design to reach a preset fragmentation in underground mining. This study notes that there are sufficiently many procedures developed and tuned for specific geological conditions in open pit mining. Different approaches to fragmentation prediction are analyzed, and the Kuz–Ram model is selected and adapted to the conditions of underground mining. This approach assumes division of a stope into sectors which differ by the parameters of grain size composition. The required relations are obtained for the Kuz–Ram model, which allow calculating an average fragment size and the uniformity factor for each sector. For variants of a stope division into sectors are analyzed and verified through the comparison with the results of the mine research of grain size compositions. From the analysis of the obtained data, the conclusion is made that the fourth variant, which is a combination of the second and third variants, is the most reliable in accord with the mine observations. This variant produces a minimum absolute error of oversize yield.

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