Digital technologies in blasting: DAVTECH's intelligent autonomous hardware-and-software suite for analyzing particle size distribution of rocks

Rock blasting is the first stage of rock crushing and it plays a defining part in the process chain of mining and processing of minerals. The difficulties in correlating the data on particle size distribution in the muck pile with the blast, the rock properties and the energy characteristics of explosives define the need to solve a wide range of scientific and practical tasks. Contemporary approaches to optimizing the particle size distribution ("fragmentation") are based on considering the energy efficiency of explosives and controlled distribution of the blast energy during the blast. At the current development stage of digital technologies in the mining industry, the qualitative and quantitative characteristics in assessing the particle size distribution are determined with the help of tools that estimate the size of the rock pieces by analyzing two- or three-dimensional images obtained by various technical means. The authors of the article present a study of the rock particle size distribution analysis based on digital technologies using a Russian innovative hardware and software suite developed by the DAVTECH Company. During a full-scale study the authors confirmed that the hardware and software suite ensures satisfactory results for a preliminary assessment of blasting operations due to faster sampling using a fully autonomous system, and it provides reliable information and allows visualizing and comparing the data of a large number of measurements. The studied hardware and software suite also secures improved safety by eliminating manual sampling directly at the muck pile, thus avoiding work in high-risk areas.