Abstract
Do you know how efficient your surface blast designs actually are? This paper will outline a blast design enhancing methodology that evaluates blast efficiency as a function of energy used to fragment rock, relative to the available energy in a charge; thereby capturing the energy losses due to the size of charge and degree of confinement, rock mass structure, voids etc. Using a mixture of field measured evidence through pre-blast surveying, post-blast muckpile photo visual fragmentation recognition and explosive energy rating, an approach to determine and improve on blast efficiency and associated cost will be explained.