Large-scale destress blasting for seismicity control in hard rock mines: A case study

Destress blasting is a rockburst control technique where highly stressed rock is blasted to reduce the local stress and stiffness of the rock, thereby reducing its burst proneness. The technique is commonly practiced in deep hard rock mines in burst prone developments, as well as in sill or crown pillars which become burst-prone as the orebody is extracted. Large-scale destressing is a variant of destress blasting where panels are created parallel to the orebody strike with a longhole, fanning blast pattern from cross cut drifts situated in the host rock. The aim of panel destressing is to reduce the stress concentration in the ore blocks or pillars to be mined. This paper focuses on the large-scale destress blasting program conducted at Vale’s Copper Cliff Mine (CCM) in Ontario, Canada. The merits of panel destressing are examined through field measurements of mining induced stress changes in the pillar. The destressing mechanism is simulated with a rock fragmentation factor (α) and stress reduction/dissipation factor (β). A 3D model is built and validated with measured induced stress changes. It is shown that the best correlation between the numerical model and field measurements is obtained when the combination of α and β indicates that the blast causes high fragmentation (α = 0.05) and high stress release (β = 0.95) in the destress panel. It is demonstrated that the burst proneness of the ore blocks in the panel stress shadow is reduced in terms of the brittle shear ratio (BSR) and the burst potential index (BPI).