The flow behavior of the ore and waste significantly affect the dilution in sublevel caving (SLC) mines. Drill and blast issues are identified as having a substantial impact upon SLC material flow. In the paper, blast-induced fragmentation in SLC was numerically investigated using the LS-DYNA code. A method was presented to evaluate fragmentation based on the damage description and a fragment identification routine implemented in the LS-PREPOST (a pre- and post-processing tool of LS-DYNA). The effects of the delay time and the primer position on fragmentation were investigated. The results indicated that a long delay time gives a finer fragmentation for the cases discussed in the paper. The results also showed that the middle primer and the top primer in SLC can give a fine fragmentation. The limitations of numerical modelling were also discussed.
Validerad;2017;Nivå 2;2017-06-05 (andbra)