ABSTRACT
Rock blasting is used in applications ranging in size from small boulder blasting in the back garden, using perhaps 10 or 20 g of explosive, to large-scale open pit mining operations where perhaps 200 tons of explosive are consumed in a single round. In 1990, the total consumption of commercial explosives in the USA was 2.1 billion kg, equivalent to a volume of solid rock broken of about 12 m3 per capita. In the USA, coal mining consumes the greatest volumes of commercial explosives. Most of the coal mining in the USA is carried out as strip mining. In view of the complexity of the science of rock blasting, have to simplify in order to solve its problems, and simplify intelligently. Some problems can solve by regarding rock as a homogeneous brittle solid. With present-day personal computers, computational solutions to several problems of this kind can be obtained with ease.
