Seismic Wave Monitoring and Ground Vibration Analysis Generated by Bench Blasting in Sungun Copper Mine

Drilling and Blasting technique is still considered to be the most economical method for rock breaking either on surface or underground mining. During the blasting process only 20–30% of explosive energy is utilized for fragmenting the rockmass and the rest is wasted in the unwanted and damaging forms of environmental disturbances and so on. Among these, ground vibration is considered to have the most damaging effect, since it causes damages on surface and subsurface structures and instability in rock structures in near and far distances form the blasting area. So that to conduct a proper blasting it is necessary to investigate and control environmental issues of blasting especially the ground vibration produced from bench blasting. Therefore, recent research was carried out to determine the propagation law of blast induced vibrations in the form of peak particle velocity (PPV) and scaled distance attenuation relation in Sungun Copper Mine, located in East Azerbaijan, Iran. During this study the ground vibration components were measured for 65 blast events during long period by means of Instantel vibration monitors. Also blasting specifications and scaled distance (distance between the source and the station normalized with maximum charge quantity per delay) were recorded carefully for each event. At the end, a best propagation law with a high correlation coefficient was established site-specific for Sungun Copper Mine.