Field Instrumentation To Measure The Performance Of Low Density (Low Shock) Explosives

Routine measurement of explosive's detonation pressure and temperature is not common practice in the mining industry. There is however a need to move beyond just measuring velocity of detonation. This is particularly important when new mixtures such as low density explosives are adopted in different domains and a better understanding of their performance is required, as expected the development of instrumentation for these purposes is not trivial as the pressures experienced are extremely high and rapidly applied. As discussed by Hopkins et al any measurement system has to be able to withstand these high pressures for sufficient time for the information to be transmitted to a data collection system before being destroyed. In an effort to provide the necessary data to begin the validation of non-ideal detonation codes and a way of providing direct input into breakage and fragmentation models used in mining applications this project was initiated.

The objective of this project was to design and build prototype instrumentation to measure detonation temperatures and pressures in production scale blasts. The main project outcomes are low cost detonation temperature and pressure sensors that can be directly connected to off-the-shelf blast monitoring data acquisition systems.