Investigation of decking system and application of Water-Deck in production blasting at open cast mines

Excavating the required raw material from an open cast mine is the process which is costly and creates bad environmental effects. Drilling and blasting is the most proper technique of excavating rock in order to minimize the costs. When the cost ratio of drilling and blasting in over all costs is concerned, it is understood that approximately 30% of the total costs is cased by drilling and blasting. Increasing demand for the raw material and decreasing the reserves require this operations to be conducted extremely economically. Additionally, blast induced environmental problems are also in question. These parameters should not give any damage to the residential areas in the vicinity of the mining sites. Especially, the major problems that the mining companies encounter is the blast induced ground vibrations and that these ground vibrations cause visible damage in the residents situated in the vicinity of the mine sites. As far as the world mining is concerned, the blasting operations conducted by conventional techniques are on the decrease. Moreover, the blasting operations have recently been based on the location of the mine and site geometry. Air Deck in other words creating an air volume within a blast hole, have recently been applied in coal open cast mines, is the example of such special operations. In the scope of this thesis, the Air Deck applications conducted at open cast mine were investigated and Water Deck which is a new method of decking was applied in production blasting at Cimentas limestone quarry. Moreover, a set of site survey was carried out in order to determine the safe charge amount for blasting at so called limestone quarry Key words: Water deck, Air deck, Blasting, Open cast mine