ABSTRACT
There have been a number of attempts over the course of the last twenty years, to develop a numerical code that can simulate various components in the process of rock blasting. A new computer program is proposed that will simulate, in a single model, each of the events associated with the blasting process. Taken separately, these are the explosive detonation and propagation at the borehole; the dynamic fragmentation due to shock and stress waves, gas and gas penetration; and the rock displacement and final muckpile and rock mass geometry. The PFC code has in the past, been used to simulate the damage around a borehole due to a dynamic pressure and due to gas penetration of fractures. Among the limiting factors of such a model are the computation time and memory requirements to perform a full three-dimensional, explicit analysis of the rock mass and blasthole geometry (such as an open pit bench or an underground ore stope). However, the calculation can be made more economical if regions within the model without fractures are taken to be elastic, and the particles in those regions replaced by a continuum formulation.
In the following, several schemes for substituting the full particle calculation in PFC by linear matrix operations for the purpose of reducing the computation burden of a blast model are proposed and evaluated. The most computationally efficient scheme will be implemented into PFC3D and the resulting code will be called AC/DC for Adaptive Continuum/DisContinuum code. The AC/DC code will serve as the computational kernel in the larger package called the Hybrid Stress Blast Model (HSBM) that will be used to perform complete blast analyses.
