PROSPECTS OF THE USE OF GRAIN-SIZE COMPOSITION PREDICTING MODELS AFTER EXPLOSION IN OPEN-PIT MINING

Mineral resources are the basis of economic growth and independence of any state. Various technologies and methods are used for the mineral extraction. However, the drilling and blasting operations are still dominant. Drilling and blasting operations are first in the chain of mining technological process and determine the economic efficiency of the entire cycle of mining and primary processing of minerals in the enterprise. The cost of drilling and blasting operations is a significant part of total production costs of large mining companies. Therefore, the improvement of the drilling and blasting technology is one of the key issues in the complex of tasks of the deposit development efficiency improvement. In this context, one of the main technological tasks facing mining engineers today is a reduction of the oversized fraction output. Currently, the efforts of scientists are aimed at developing reliable grain-size composition predicting models for the extracting rock mass, as one of the initial factors for reducing economic losses throughout the technological cycle. However, many of the existing models do not consider the mutual influence of a number of factors, which explains the instability of the drilling and blasting performance indicators, their low efficiency and, as a result, an increased oversized fraction output. The model for grain-size composition predicting for mining enterprises will be interesting only if the proposed technological solution together with a pre-established fraction of rock mass will increase the efficiency of blasting operations with the desired reduction of all material and non-material expenditures. In this paper the authors give a brief overview of the global mining volumes; provides information on the extraction of key types of minerals (mineral fuel, ferrous metals, non-ferrous metals, precious metals, industrial minerals), as well as revenues derived from their sale. On the example of domestic companies, the authors give the analysis of approaches to solving the issues of predicting of the oversized fraction output after the explosion. They also specify the direction for future actions in creating a predicting model for the rock mass output of a certain fragmentation after the explosion.