Pattern Compliance

Creating accurate blast designs that consider the geological conditions, explosive properties, and desired fragmentation size is crucial. Deviations from the design result in inefficient blasting and increased operational costs. However, the geological conditions in mining sites can vary significantly, making it challenging to design consistent drilling and blasting patterns. Material density, fault lines, and contaminants influence the design of the pattern.

To address these issues, many mining companies are turning to drilling and blasting technologies and equipment to achieve pattern compliance. However, these companies often miss the basic disciplines to deliver compliance to burden, depth, spacing. In many cases, excavators are deployed before recording actual results to the planned burden, depth, spacing and penetration rate, and the integrity of the drill hole. It is crucial to optimize existing information and investments before considering additional or different technologies. The ability to act quickly on lessons learned is fundamental to improving both operational results and profitability.

Often operating in proximity to communities, mining companies must be sensitive to concerns about noise, dust, and vibration. A strong first step in lessening these concerns is to reduce the frequency, costs and delays associated with holes that must be re-drilled.

Key Client Challenges:

1. How can we improve the accuracy of our blast designs to ensure better pattern compliance?
2. Are there ways to use data analytics to identify trends and patterns in our drilling and blasting data that can inform better compliance strategies?
3. How can we address geological variability and adapt our drilling and blasting patterns accordingly?
4. What are the best practices for training our drillers and blasters to ensure they understand the importance of pattern compliance and can execute it effectively?
5. What measures can we put in place to ensure the safety of our personnel while achieving pattern compliance?
6. How can we minimize the environmental impact of drilling and blasting while still achieving pattern compliance?
7. Are there innovative drilling and blasting technologies or methodologies that we should consider adopting to improve pattern compliance?

Continuous monitoring of drilling and blasting operations is necessary to ensure pattern compliance. By investing in monitoring technologies such as seismographs and drones to assess the impact of blasts, adjustments can be made as needed to blasting operations. However, the adoption of these technologies is only the first step. Buy-in from management and employees at all organizational levels is equally important to ensure that new technologies are deployed effectively for better pattern compliance.

At Unison Mining, our goal is to foster an environment of continuous improvement, where lessons learned from each drilling and blasting operation are used to refine processes and enhance pattern compliance over time. This can be achieved by working closely with your team to identify the biggest opportunities in your existing processes, systems and KPIs to incentivize change for the long haul.