AI is coming to drill and blasting operations to help improve fragmentation and reduce costs. Eltirus founder Steve Franklin explains how.
When I was new to the industry, an old hand told me that the best crusher you have is the one in the pit, by which he meant effective drill and blast.
Drill and blast can be challenging. Holes not being drilled to design, missing holes, short holes, excessive fallback, damaged or destroyed drill holes, drill holes not being loaded, misfires, ground vibrations, air blasts, fly rock, back break and more can provide no end of trouble. These obstacles not only impact the efficiency and safety of the drilling and blasting process, but also the results.
Surprisingly, even though there are a lot of tools in the drill and blast space, up until now there hasn’t been an integrated system that can take you all the way from drone survey through blast design, drill, load and fire and then tie back the analysis of the results – in essence a quarry blast to primary crusher feedback loop.
After some research internationally, we found that such a system does exist in the form of the Strayos AI analytics platform.
The value of data
Data is a company’s greatest asset. This is the era of big data. There is so much of it that companies are being buried under it or leaving the rich resource untapped because they don’t know what to do with it or because it’s just too much to deal with right now.
That’s where AI and analytics come in. They sift through the mountains of data and pull out the nuggets in an easily accessible and usable form and the more data they get, the better they get at analysing it for you.
Strayos takes all the data gathered from drones, from satellites, from smart drills, from sensors, from lasers, from cameras and processes it for you, giving you accessible insights and usable models. More data allows you to analyse workflows, identify areas for improvement, increase efficiencies, etc. and companies who use this newfound insight can make better decisions and provide a competitive edge.
So, what can we do to help improve drill and blast performance through the application of tools such as drone and AI analytics software?
Benchmarking
The first thing you need to have is a good idea of current drill and blast performance. Understanding current performance is critical to providing a baseline you can measure improvement against.
Benchmarking success in drill and blast operations crucially hinges on several key performance indicators. Efficiency, safety, cost-effectiveness, and environmental impact stand as the primary metrics.
A successful operation is marked by optimised drilling rates that maximise rock fragmentation, adapt to geological variations and minimise the use of explosives, ensuring cost savings and a reduced environmental impact. Safety metrics are paramount, with the aim to minimise accidents and ensure compliance with all regulatory standards.
Once you understand your baseline, you can start to employ technology for more precise blasting and use data analytics and AI for continuous improvement – modern hallmarks of excellence in drill and blast operations.
Bench mapping using drones
Drones are a great way to map a bench ready for planning. Initially this was not considered the case as when a drone was used to only take photos vertically, underhanging areas would be missed with consequent issues around front row burden.
Drones such as the DJI M3E and M4E have superior object avoidance and terrain following technology and can be used to fly with the camera at an oblique angle in terrain following mode to ensure that a face is captured exactly, ensuring that you can have full confidence that the front row can be accurately planned.
Strayos can deal with whole-of-site drone flights or just a single blast area and given that the pricing model is fixed fee, this can be done without worrying about upload costs.
In addition to physical survey of the area, the rock mass classification AI can automatically detect and analyse critical geological features such as bedding planes, joints, spacing, and fractures to further improve drill and blast design, even to the point of being able to automatically map the structures directly onto a 3D model for geotechnical insights.
Blast design AI
One the key values of Strayos is that everything is done in one platform.
When you begin interacting with the 3D models the real power becomes apparent. Shotfirers can plan their shots by inputting their blast designs into the bench model and the algorithm will generate the face profile, blast volume, rock fragmentation and even muck pile shape. If you don’t like what you get, just enter a different blast plan.
Once you have designed the pattern, ensuring that the holes have the exact burden, spacing, depth, inclination, and azimuth, you can then provide this as an IREDES file for a smart rig to execute.
Measure while drilling analytics
Data from smart drills on what they encounter while drilling the blast holes is captured and brought into Strayos for analysis. This measure while drilling (MWD) data can be difficult to use and interpret. Strayos makes it easy to visualise and integrate MWD data with blast design.
Information such as the hardness of the rock layers encountered, the burden, the declination of the hole, and the final collar position of the hole allows the shot firer to adjust the charge in the moments right up to the actual blast.
If your rigs don’t have MWD capability, the Strayos Fielder App can be used to manually log the data, allowing data to be logged faster, while making it easier to save and share the data in operations. In addition, having the drillers’ logged data instantly appear on your 3D models allows shotfirers to better visualise the logged data in parallel to loading.
Tracking overburden, seams, voids and geological changes has never been easier. On top of drilling data and performance, tracking man hours, drill bits, consumables and fuel consumed and compiling the needed information in one place, makes daily, weekly and monthly drill tracking an automated task.
Hole deviation analytics
Boretrak data can be read and visualised in 3D, providing quality control assessment of the drilling as well as a clear model of hole collar and toe locations. This data brings tremendous value to the shotfirer, as knowing the exact face burden will dictate how the face holes are loaded, ultimately reducing the risk of fly rock and excessive vibration and air blast.
Fragmentation AI
Once a drill and blast design that is complete, Strayos has the capabilities to provide fragmentation, muck pile profile, and vibration models. To fully apply the optimal workflow, comparing these predictions to post-blast data will feed the machine learning algorithms within the platform to produce more accurate predictions for future blasts. Strayos automates fragmentation analysis in three primary ways:
- Flying a drone over the shot post blast and uploading the data for analysis in Strayos.
- Using the Strayos FragR app on a mobile device.
- Employing the Strayos Netra 3D machine vision system to assess material size and shape as it is being tipped into the primary crusher.
Whichever method is used, the results can be fed back into the system, improving results as more and more data is collected. In essence, after each blast is fired, a comparison between predicted and actual performance is carried out by the system analytics and AI to provide analysis on how a particular design performed and what could be improved.
Switching to AI
Switching to an AI platform can be intimidating at first, but its surprisingly easy to do and the benefits make it well worth it.
In one case study, a site achieved a 30 per cent reduction in secondary breakage and a 25 per cent decrease in overall operational costs through adoption of the Strayos AI analytic platform and drill and blast tools.
Strayos has worked with some of the largest and smallest drilling and blasting companies in the North American industry and it is now used by a majority of the drill and blast contractors in that region.
Our experience is that they listen to their user based and proactively work to improve the platform on a continual basis, and if you run into any issues, you will get to work with a human, to resolve any and all questions you have. •
Eltirus is a Strayos reseller. For more information, contact steve.franklin@eltirus.com or visit eltirus.com
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