ABSTRACT
Computational Mechanics and Computational Physics in general have gone a long way since their humble beginnings when “large scale” simulations comprised 16 or 32 degrees of freedom. The progress is due to many factors including: (a) ever increasing need for predictive capabilities in various branches of science, engineering, and industry; (b) ever increasing affordability of high performance computer hardware (in only a couple of decades a jump from unaffordable single processor computers to parallel desktop machines costing hundreds of dollars has been made); (c) ever more sophisticated computational solvers, methods, and algorithms being developed. Nevertheless, there are a large number of problems and processes that remain outside predictive capabilities of the present numerical simulation technology. The rock blasting process (Hopler 1998, Holmberg 1979, Fourney 2006, Blear 2006, Blair 1996, Fleetwood 2009, Fitzgerald 2011, Thornton 2009, Tordoir 2009) is to a large extent one of these. In general, there are several reasons for a particular problem to remain outside the scope of present predictive simulation capabilities: (a) no satisfactory numerical solutions have been developed; (b) existing numerical solutions take a long time to run (the so called grand challenge problems); (c) numerical solutions are prohibitively expensive and/or unaffordable.
