A review of the development of better prediction equations for blast fragmentation

Abstract

Abstract The paper reviews the development of prediction formulas for the fragmentation from bench blasting. Much attention has been paid to the Kuz-Ram model, its development and errors, and the mean vs. median misunderstanding. The work by the US Bureau of Mines (USBM) and Chung and Katsabanis are also reviewed, as well as the two Julius Kruttschnitt Mineral Research Centre (JKMRC) models, i.e. the crush zone model (CZM) and the two-component model (TCM), which were developed to cope with the underestimation of blasting fines. The change brought by the Swebrec distribution and the associated Kuznetsov-Cunningham-Ouchterlony (KCO) model is described. Studying distribution-free fragment sizes x P for an arbitrary mass passing P led to the discovery of the fragmentation-energy fan, and with the help of dimensional analysis, to the new fragmentation prediction model x P -frag, which has much lower errors than those of the Kuz-Ram and CZM models.