Predicting Detonation Characteristics and Performance of Commercial Explosives for the Mining and Explosive Manufacturing Industries

工业炸药，如硝酸铵基商业产品，在采矿和采石业中广泛使用，以破碎岩石，使其能够被移除，从而获得目标矿物，或破碎含矿物的岩石进行加工。优化爆破过程是将危险、环境破坏和成本降至最低的关键。影响结果的因素包括炸药的选择（固体/液体、配方、添加剂、密度）、装药（钻孔）直径、装药/钻孔深度、起爆系统、钻孔布局和密度、引爆时间。该设计显著影响下游操作的成本，例如，不希望产生的研磨成本高的超大卵石或太细而不易处理的材料、从岩石爆破现场到炸药现场的运输、钻孔成本以及爆破和岩石转移操作之间的时间。与此同时，在日益严格的立法下，最大限度地减少相关危害和环境影响至关重要。一次爆破失败，至少会使费用加倍，使矿井关闭，损失数百万美元。因此，采矿业对任何能够优化爆破过程的方法都有着巨大的需求和市场。在这些商业炸药中，爆炸过程以每秒数公里的速度发生，并产生数吉帕斯卡的压力-正是这种巨大的力量在爆破作业中被用来破碎岩石。然而，商用炸药的爆轰过程是“高度非理想的”，因为波的传播是由多维效应和化学动力学之间的强耦合决定的，导致与假设瞬时反应所预测的“理想”行为有非常大的偏差。这些炸药的反应区为几毫米，导致临界直径为几厘米或更大。这是炸药的尺寸，低于这个尺寸就不会引爆-了解这一点对于确保爆炸的完整性和安全至关重要。这些炸药的非理想行为以及由此产生的爆炸速度和压力、钻孔直径、岩石类型及其运动和破碎之间的非常强的反馈，使得对该过程的预测极具挑战性，并且在EPSRC对该研究领域的持续资助导致突破性研究之前，不存在令人满意的方法。这最终导致了一种新的“变分流线方法”，通过EP/F006004/01开发的问题，该方法解决了任意精度的问题，同时计算成本极低，允许进行非常大的参数研究。后续基金提案的目的是采用通过先前的EPSRC项目开发的学术研究代码和技术，将它们定量地应用于商业炸药和岩石爆破，并产生一套商业非理想爆炸物理软件工具，可供炸药制造和采矿业利用，以优化爆破设计。

Industrial explosives, such as ammonium nitrate-based commercial products, are used extensively within the mining and quarrying industries to fragment rock to either allow its removal giving access to the target mineral or to break up mineral-bearing rock for processing. Optimization of the blasting process is key to minimizing hazard, environmental damage and costs. Factors affecting the outcome include choice of explosive (solid/liquid, formulation, additives, density), charge (borehole) diameter, charge loading/borehole depth, initiating system, borehole layout and density, detonation timings. The design significantly impacts on costs of downstream operations, e.g. unwanted production of oversize boulders which are costly to mill or material too fine to handle easily, the transport from the blast site of rock and to the site of explosive, drilling costs and time between blasts and rock transfer operations. At the same time, minimisation of the associated hazards and environmental impacts, under increasingly restrictive legislation, is paramount. A failed blast results in doubling of costs at the minimum to a mine closure representing a loss of millions of dollars. Hence there is a significant need and market in the mining sector for any method which can help to optimise blasting processes.In these commercial explosive, the detonation process occurs at speeds of kilometres per second and produces pressures of several gigaPascals - it is this enormous power which is harnessed to shatter rock in blasting operations. However, the detonation processes in commercial explosives is "highly non-ideal" in that the propagation of the wave is determined by the strong coupling between multi-dimensional effects and chemical kinetics, leading to very significant departures from "ideal" behaviour predicted by assuming instantaneous reaction. These explosives have reaction zones of several millimetres, resulting in critical diameters of several centimetres or more. This is the size of explosive below which it does not detonate - knowledge of this is vital to ensure both the integrity of the blast and for safety. The non-ideal behaviour of these explosives and the resulting very strong feedback between detonation speed and pressure, borehole diameter, the rock type and its movement and breakage, makes prediction of the process extremely challenging and no satisfactory method existed before the breakthrough research resulting from the sustained EPSRC funding for this research area. This has culminated in a novel "Variational Streamline Approach" to the problem developed via EP/F006004/01 which solves the problem to arbitrary accuracy while being extremely computationally cheap allowing very large parametric studies to be performed.The purpose of the Follow On Fund proposal is take to the academic research codes and techniques developed via the prior EPSRC project, apply them quantitaively to commercial explosives and rock blasting and produce a commercial suite of non-ideal detonation physics software tools which can be exploited by the explosive manufacturing and mining industries to optimise blast design.