South African company BME announced that it has launched and made freely available a new Blasting Guide application that enables users to quickly calculate and check blast designs.
Currently available for Android devices, the app is aimed at replacing traditional paper booklets carried and referenced by in-field users.
The system includes a blast design calculator, quick calculators and prediction calculators, with both metric and imperial unit measurements. The solution also includes surface blast design rules of thumb, environmental guidelines, and a table of common rock properties.
According to BME, even though the app is not itself a blast design tool, it provides powerful means of verifying blast design outputs and making blast planning decisions.
“The blast design calculator is a series of guiding formulas that allows a blaster or engineer to plan a blast from start to finish,” said D. Scott Scovira, BME’s global manager of blasting science, in a media statement. “The blast design calculator utilises user inputs including burden, spacing, stemming height, sub-drill, hole diameter, bench height and explosive type to determine explosive loads, powder factors and other outputs. It could be used, for example, to investigate potential blast patterns for a greenfield site – where numerous scenarios may be quickly generated and calculations checked.”
Scovira added that the rules of thumb table – which summarises surface blast design guidelines – can be referenced by the user as they access the blast design calculators.
“The quick calculator includes a BME in-house formula for the target powder factor, as well as calculations related to the volume of rock to be blasted – either volume per hole or volume per blast,” the executive said. “There are energy equations to compare different types of explosives based on their relative bulk strength, while hole-charging equations determine the mass of explosives going into a hole and address loading with gassed emulsion products. This helps determine column lengths and stemming lengths – with gassed and ungassed explosives.”