Assessment of blasting efficiency by seismic surveys and rope shovel performance monitoring: A case study

ABSTRACT In this paper, diggability assessment studies for an electrical rope shovel undertaken in a producing surface lignite mine is presented. For this purpose, a test bench is selected and shovel performance monitoring together with various surveys were carried out on this bench. Manual stopwatch surveys, recording of peak and mean power consumption of the shovel were made before and after blasting. Mass and material properties of the overburden strata were defined, seismic surveys were conducted to measure in-situ P-wave velocities before and after blasting. Bock Quality Indexes were established during blasthole drilling in order to correlated with any local variation in the overburden strata. The accumulated data was analysed in order to examine the efficiency of blasting and its likely effect on the rope shovel performance in terms of production capacity and power consumption. Furthermore a cost analysis is made in order to demonstrate the differentiation of unit handling costs between direct diggi...