A CONCEPTUAL TOOL TO QUANTIFY THE TRAJECTORY OF FLYROCK

Authors

  • Jennifer van der Walt University of Pretoria (Department of Mining Engineering) http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9542-3721
  • William Spiteri University of Pretoria (Department of Mining Engineering)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17159/

Abstract

Flyrock remains a significant risk to the health and safety of mine employees and infrastructure as well as to the safety of the neighbouring communities and their property.  This investigation was motivated by the general lack of fundamental research and mathematically quantifiable data in the literature regarding the relationship between blast design parameters and the risk of flyrock.  The focus of this investigation was to develop a concept that can quantify the trajectory of flyrock resulting from a blast, which can be used for future research. The ultimate goal for this tool is to:

  • Enable mining operations to generate a database with accurate historical flyrock measurements resulting from their blasting operations.
  • Allow research teams to conduct scientific investigations into flyrock and the impact of various blast design parameters. 
  • Generate point-cloud data to visualise blasts and flyrock in Virtual Reality for training and education purposes.
This paper summarises a conceptual tool and preliminary fieldwork that was carried out to determine the tool’s feasibility and motivate further development. The results showed conclusively that a modified photogrammetry technique is capable of capturing flyrock data for further processing and analysis. The data acquisition procedure can, at this point, be used to meet the first aim of the project, namely to gather a field database of historical flyrock generation. Further development of the concept is ongoing and it is envisioned that the scientifically based tool will provide a method whereby future flyrock studies will be comparable and that assumptions will be limited.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Published

2026-04-15

Issue

Vol. 124 No. 8 (2024): SAIMM Journal

Section

Papers of General Interest

License

Copyright (c) 2024 Jennifer van der Walt, William Spiteri

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

THE INSTITUTE, AS A BODY, IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE STATEMENTS AND OPINIONS ADVANCED IN ANY OF ITS PUBLICATIONS.

Copyright© 1978 by The Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy. All rights reserved. Multiple copying of the contents of this publication or parts thereof without permission is in breach of copyright, but permission is hereby given for the copying of titles and abstracts of papers and names of authors. Permission to copy illustrations and short extracts from the text of individual contributions is usually given upon written application to the Institute, provided that the source (and where appropriate, the copyright) is acknowledged. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of review or criticism under The Copyright Act no. 98, 1978, Section 12, of the Republic of South Africa, a single copy of an article may be supplied by a library for the purposes of research or private study. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publishers. Multiple copying of the contents of the publication without permission is always illegal.

U.S. Copyright Law applicable to users In the U.S.A.

The appearance of the statement of copyright at the bottom of the first page of an article appearing in this journal indicates that the copyright holder consents to the making of copies of the article for personal or internal use. This consent is given on condition that the copier pays the stated fee for each copy of a paper beyond that permitted by Section 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. The fee is to be paid through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., Operations Center, P.O. Box 765, Schenectady, New York 12301, U.S.A. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying, such as copying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works, or for resale.