Numerical Simulation of Excavation in Opencast Mine and its Effect on Ground Vibration

Abstract

Blasting is a significant operation for the mining industry and ground vibration is one of the unavoidable consequences. It is essential to predict the vibration due to blasting accurately, a lot of relations are proposed by different researchers but those relations do not consider the effect of geometry. The present paper is an attempt to investigate the effect of excavation. An excavation was made between blasting face and highwall and its effect on ground vibrations was analysed using numerical simulation. ‘Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continua’ (FLAC3D) has been used for simulation. The peak particle velocity (PPV) data from the field has been compared with PPV obtained with numerical simulation to validate the model. Parameters like velocity, acceleration and Stresses were monitored and analyzed during blasting simulation. Results indicate that the adverse effect of ground vibration, i.e. PPV, decreases after excavation, but the PPV value for excavation itself increase during blasting. © 2022, The Institution of Engineers (India).