Investigating the impacts of fragmentation due to blasting operation on machinary efficiency of Sarcheshmeh Copper Mine

Producing more fragmented rock by blasting requires increased costs in drilling and blasting operations. On the other hand, it leads to a reduction of loading, haulage operation and no need for secondary blasting. In this study, the effective parameters in machinary efficiency of Sarcheshmeh Copper Mine was explored. For this purpose, the ratio parameter of length to width of the blast block (RLW) and the Loading parameters including Operation(O1), Failure(F1), Ready (R1), Movement of loading machine (M1), were introduced, measured and used. The blasing block's ratio of length to width (RLW) parameter is presented in most of the proposed models. This parameter has been effective in efficiency of loading machinary. The high correlation coefficient of a loading cycle of machine’s bucket (C1) with the independent variables shows that this variable is more affected by the fragmentaion and the dimensions of blasted blocks. The best and the worst of a loading cycle of machine’s bucket (C1) are equal to 14.38 and 51.15 seconds in Sarcheshmeh Copper minefor which (D50) corresponds to 3.02 and 10.39, cm respectively and (D80) equals to 6.69 and 24.49 cm, respectively. The Correlation coefficient of 0.8 for specific loading (S1) indicates the high influence of fragmentation caused by blasting operations on specific loading (S1).