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Quarrying and Open Pit

Mining
Finding the Best
Combination
Large quantities of raw material
are produced in various types of
surface operations. Where the
product is rock, the operations are
known as quarries. Where metallic
ore or non-metallic minerals are
involved, they are called open pit
mines. There are many common
parameters in design and choice of
equipment, and in the process of
finding the best combination of
drilling and blasting methods.
Atlas Copco has the advantage of
long experience in all types of sur-
face drilling operations, with a
product range to match. With its
history of innovative engineering,
the company tends to think for-
ward, and is able to advise the user Figure 1 Typical quarry layout.
on improving design elements of
the operation that will result in Quarries are normally run by opera- Shallower Benches
overall cost savings. tors who sell their products to nearby
contractors and road administrators. Whereas high benches, above 30 m,
This means that in areas where con- were previously quite common, nowa-
Quarries struction activities are high, several days they are shallower, for improved
competing quarries may be estab- safety and economy. The width of the
A quarry is a factory that converts solid lished. Apart from environmental bench should be sufficient, both to
bedrock into crushed stone. The exca- aspects, such operations can disturb accommodate the spread of rock blast,
vated rock is crushed, screened, the neighbouring area in the form of and to provide space for the
washed and separated into different noise from drilling, vibrations from equipment.
sizes, for subsequent sale and use. The blasting, and dust from crushing and The height of the working face in
amount of fines should be kept to a screening. Quarries, wherever possible, hill type quarries is determined mainly
minimum. The final products are used are therefore discreetly located, as by the topography.
as raw material for chemical plants, close as feasible to the construction A typical work cycle in a quarry con-
such as limestone for cement manufac- area, because the products are trans- sists of a number of work elements.
turing, paper and steel industries, and port cost sensitive. Drilling of blast holes is undertaken in
clay shales for building materials, or as Quarries can be either of the a predetermined pattern, followed by
raw material for concrete aggregates, common pit type or, in mountainous plugging the drill holes with wooden
highway construction, or other civil terrain, the hillside type. Pit type quar- or plastic plugs to prevent debris from
engineering projects. ries are opened up below the level of falling down into the holes.
Not all types of rock are suitable as surrounding terrain, and accessed by When an adequate number of holes
raw material for crushed stone. The means of ramps (figure 1). The excava- have been drilled, preparations for
material must have certain strength tion is often split into several benches, blasting will start. The holes are blown
and hardness, and the pieces acquire a depending on the depth of the opera- clean with compressed air to remove
defined shape with a rough surface. tions. In its first stage, when the terrain water and rock fragments, and are
Consequently, soft sedimentary rock, is rough and bulldozers cannot pro- then charged with a booster bottom
and material which breaks into flat, vide a flat floor, a top-hammer con- charge, detonators and explosives.
flaky pieces, are unacceptable. Igneous struction type drill rig can be used to Stemming is inserted into the top of
rock such as granite and basalt, as well establish the first bench. Once the first each hole, and the detonator leads are
as old Precambrian highly metamor- bench is prepared, production drilling connected. Where electric detonators
phic rock such as gneiss, are well is preferably carried out using DTH- or are used, the circuit resistance is
suited. COPROD techniques. checked with an ohmmeter. The area

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Typical cost distribution at quarries is evacuated, equipment is moved

away, and the round is fired.
Before loading, the lower quarry
floor is cleaned of fly rock with a wheel
loader. Blasted rock is then loaded into
25% trucks, and transported to the crusher
50%
station. Large boulders are pushed
7% aside, and stockpiled for subsequent
28%
secondary breaking. Rock is discharged
directly, or via a grizzley for size con-
25% trol, into the primary crusher.
Crushing, Screening and Storage
Thereafter, it is transported by convey-
Loading and Transport or belts for secondary, and possibly
65%
Drilling and Blasting tertiary, crushing.
Blasting The different products, comprising
Drilling
rock fragments of certain size ranges,
Drill string
are recovered from the process by
vibrating screens, and transported to
storage silos or bunker piles on the
ground.
Figure 2 Operational cost distribution at quarries.
Optimum Efficiency
Crusher Fragmentation
There are various factors to be consid-
ered when trying to achieve optimum
Over-sized has to be re-drilled
and blasted and is very expensive. efficiency and overall economy from
quarrying operations, the most impor-
tant of which is cost reduction. Figure
2 illustrates a typical cost distribution
Drill pattern
between drilling and blasting, loading
What size is the crusher?
What is the tonnage requirement? Spacing and transport, and crushing, screening
Determines hole size. and storage. It should be noted that
crushing, screening and storage repre-
Burden
sent about half of the costs, whereas
Hole sizes Bench
Height drilling represents less than 10%. More
often than not, the crushing operation
is the bottleneck in the total work-
O 64 160 mm
cycle. It is sometimes the case that
extra expenditure in drilling and blast-
Hole size and blasting techniques determine other parameters.
ing might be the only way to assure
free flow through the crusher, in order
to utilise full capacity in the plant, and
Figure 3 Fragmentation in quarries. improve overall economy. Good frag-
mentation and smooth benches will
also have a positive effect on loading
Drilling Methods
and transport equipment.
Trends ± In the 1980s, there was a trend
amongst rock producers to abandon
Pneumatic ---
Tophammers the use of large diameter holes, giving
larger size fragmentation, in favour of
Hydraulic
+++ medium size 89-165 mm (3.5-6.5 in)
Tophammers
holes. The trend in crushing equip-
ment is in the opposite direction, as
TDS Guide
Tubes + the manufacturers are going for larger
equipment, enabling larger size boul-
COPROD ++ ders to pass through the primary
crusher.
From an economics viewpoint,
DTH Hammers ++ however, it is obvious that large size
crushers are primarily designed to
Rotary Drilling -- handle large amounts of rock material,
rather than large size material.
64 165 Therefore, it is worth assessing the
25 50 75 100 125 150 175 200 225 250 mm rock fragmentation derived from the
Hole Diameter drilling and blasting cycle, in case
some additional investment in drilling
Figure 4 Trends in quarrying. is the answer (figure 3).

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The whole chain of activities leading

to the final product of crushed materi-
al must be considered when optimis-
Waste ing total costs.
Drilling costs depend on the hole
Bench
size and drilling density, in which accu-
slope 72o Good slope stability racy of drilling is a factor; blasting
costs depend on the amount and type
Pit slope 45o of explosives, and number of detona-
tors; and loading, transport and crush-
ing costs depend on quarry floor
y
od

roughness, and fragmentation.

eb

Good fragmentation needed For most drilling applications, the

Or

optimum ratio between bench height

and burden seems to be in the range of
3 to 4, indicating that hole diameters
Open pit mining, principle cross-section of 125-165 mm (5-6 in) are best for a
bench height in the order of 18 m.
Figure 5 General principles of open pit mining. Figure 4 shows the trends in choice
of drilling method. There is a clear
movement towards more hydraulic
tophammer, COPROD-drilling and
DTH, and away from pneumatic and
rotary drilling.

Open Pit Mining

Mass blasting Mass blasting: A major main difference between open
Optimised drilling with pit mining and quarries is the geologi-
Back cal conditions and the demand charac-
respect to production cost
break teristics on the blasted material.
zone Whereas quarries deliver the majority
of rock via the crushing and screening
Restricted blasting:
plant in various size fractions, the open
Undue damage of the rock
pit mine attempts to deliver the ore as
Restricted blasting slope will be reduced
pure as possible via crushers to the
dressing plant, consisting of mills, sepa-
rators, and/or flotation, and/or bio-
chemical systems, and finally to
smelters, in order to convert minerals
Figure 6 Restricted blasting improves pit slope stability. to metals.
As no orebodies have the perfect
conical shape which is tailor-made for
the geometry of a pit, vast quantities
of waste usually have to be removed
from both the hanging wall and the
foot wall in order to mine the ore.
Buffer holes - 127-165 mm
Contour holes - 127-165 mm Figure 5 shows a sectional layout of a
Production holes - 127-250 mm typical pit. The waste to ore ratio
increases as the pit gets deeper.
Eventually, for economic reasons, the
open pit will be abandoned, or under-
ground mining will take over. Without
jeopardising slope stability, it is of
prime importance to keep the pit slope
angle as steep as possible, maintaining
excavated waste at a minimum.
The demands on fragmentation of
the waste, as it will not pass through
the crushing/dressing system, are
simple. It should merely suit the load-
ing and trucking equipment used for
subsequent removal to the waste
dump. On the other hand, good frag-
mentation of the blasted ore will make
great savings in the total costs of the
Figure 7 Drilling pattern for presplit in open pit mining. mineral dressing process.

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Benches using
Benches using 42 ms delay between rows
pre-splitting and
rotary rigs
DTH drilling
detonating cord
Waste excess

2.5 m stemming
ø 127 mm
ROC L8 holes

5.0 m
Emulan
explosives
(10.5 kg/m)

Figure 8 Savings in waste extraction by increasing the pit slope. 0.8 m overdrilling

2x Nonel detonators (500 ms)

m 4.8
35 m + boosters
3.

Figure 10 Charging for soufflé blasting.

cope with the inflexibility of the rotary

rig still remains, this measure will not
Soufflé blasting derive the full potential benefits of the
DTH drilling method.
Figure 8 shows the advantages
related to using an Atlas Copco ROC
L8 rig, having the ability to drill
inclined holes close to the bench wall,
compared to a traditional rotary rig.

Soufflé Blasting
Mining of rich, narrow and irregularly
Firing sequence (42 ms between consecutive numbers 1-6) stratified ore zones, such as gold min-
eralisations, requires extra attention, in
order not to introduce unnecessary
Figure 9 Soufflé blasting at Björkdal gold mine.
quantities of waste into the ore stream.
Consequently, this type of mining has
Steep and Stable Slopes method in open pit mining has been to be progressed on a selective basis, in
large hole rotary drilling using hole close liaison with surveyors and geolo-
Blasting will not only break the rock sizes in the 250 to 400 mm (10- gists, and taking frequent samples
that is planned to be excavated, but 15.75 in) range. No doubt this implies before and after each individual blast.
will also cause damage to the slopes lower cost for drilling, ignoring the Short benches and small holes are used
that form the boundaries of the pit. expense of excess waste and less to cope with ore zone irregularities. A
The extent of this overbreak is mainly favourable fragmentation. A recent recently developed method to ensure
dependent on the size of the individual survey of 36 open pit operations in maximum recovery from each blast is
charge and its proximity. A common Chile using hole sizes between 75 and called soufflé blasting. Figures 9 and 10
means of minimising overbreak is to 345 mm (3.0-13.75 in) reveals that illustrate this principle of cautious blast-
use smaller diameter holes, making hole sizes above 200 mm (8 in) do not ing with a minimum of dilution as
provision for restricted blasting in the generate any substantial savings in practised at the Björkdal gold mine in
zone next to the planned bench slope. total drilled metres per tonne. This Sweden. To a depth of merely 5 m,
Figure 6 shows two different blast indicates that burden and spacing 100 vertical holes are blasted in one
designs. cannot be increased indefinitely. One round, without free surface for ex-
Figure 7 shows a typical drilling pat- important reason for replacing rotary pansion. The firing sequence starts
tern to be applied in connection with with other methods is the inflexibility in the centre and, thanks to 2.5 m of
pre-split blasting, to achieve increased of the heavy rotary rigs, which are stemming, the blasted ore material
slope stability with reduced back restricted to vertical benches and just swells on site like baking a soufflé.
break. single pass drilling only. Selective extraction by back hoe
A possible, but not advisable, step loaders facilitates maximum recovery
Drilling Patterns in obtaining smaller holes, is to adapt of the rich, narrow gold-bearing
rotary rigs to DTH drilling, by adding zones.
Traditionally, focusing on the drilling a high-pressure compressor to the
cost parameter, the predominant rig. As the need for wide benches to by Hans Fernberg

SURFACE DRILLING 35