ABSTRACT
Boreholes can develop tremendous amount of pressures during blasting. Excessive pressures can impair detonators, especially electronic detonators. Electronic detonators are increasingly being adopted in the last few years in a variety of applications. Electronic detonators offer several distinctive features over electric and non-electric detonators, including safety, traceability, field programming of delays, better timing accuracy resulting in improved fragmentation, reduced vibration and noise control. Dynamic pressures during blasting, especially sympathetic pressures from adjacent holes or underlying decks, have been suspected to cause misfires in electronic and non-electronic detonators. Measuring the pressures during blasting can aid to understand the magnitude of the pressure developed as a function of blasting conditions on the resulting fragmentation.
