Use of Geospatial Queries for Optimum Drilling and Blasting Practices in Surface Mining

Abstract

Increasing demand of the modern society for energy and raw material strengthens the role of mining in sustainable development. The basic production cycle of surface mining is initiated by drilling and blasting the material that will be loaded, hauled, and dumped by various mobile equipment. Performance measurement and analysis of all these production stages by the utilization of available technology is of crucial importance for continuous improvement of modern mine operations. Today, most of the mobile equipment used in open-pit mining have the capability to provide data related to production, positioning and machine health. Drilling equipment can be tracked by high-precision GPS systems to guide operators for the accuracy of the drill hole locations and also for comparing the drill plans and the actual drilled hole locations. Similarly, the blasting process can be managed by utilizing the data related to the amount and type of explosive charged into each blast hole. Typically, these are recorded on different environments, and each hole is named differently in each environment. As a final outcome, fragmentation of the blasted material can be investigated at multiple stages of production, such as loading, dumping, crushing, conveying, or others by using particle sizing software. However, it is challenging to derive knowledge from all of this data generated by various equipment and systems unless it is integrated for decision-making or analysis. Geospatial queries are quite effective and fast in handling geo-coordinate data and are ideal for integrating drilling and blasting data. This study introduces a systematic approach to integrate drilling and blasting related operational data collected either manually or automatically by using geospatial queries as part of integration in a data warehouse of an open-pit copper mine.