Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditional rock breakage methods in hard rock mining heavily rely on explosives, which pose significant environmental, safety, and operational concerns to workers and surrounding communities. To address these concerns, Soundless Chemical Demolition Agents (SCDA) have gained attention as a safer and more sustainable alternative for rock breakage. SCDA, primarily composed of lime (CaO), are soundless, vibration-free, and fumeless, making them particularly suitable for applications where minimizing dust, noise, and fumes is essential. Despite these advantages, SCDA performance can be influenced by environmental and operational factors, particularly in cold climates. This thesis investigates key parameters affecting SCDA performance and introduces innovative methods to enhance their efficiency in challenging conditions.This thesis is divided into two phases. The first phase focuses on the effect of warmer mixing water temperature on the mechanical performance of two commercially available SCDA brands: Betonamit Type R (BT-R) and Dexpan Type 3 (DXP-3). Experiments conducted on 152.4 mm (6 inch) cubic granite samples at varying ambient temperatures reveal that higher mixing water temperatures significantly accelerate rock breakage. For instance, increasing the mixing water temperature from 20°C to 40°C reduced the time to first crack (TFC) by 36% for BT-R and 74% for DXP-3 at 0°C ambient temperature. These results highlight the critical role of heated mixing water in enhancing SCDA efficiency, particularly in colder ambient conditions typical of Canadian open-pit mining operations.The second phase investigates a hybrid approach, termed Accelerated Rock Breakage (ARB), to address SCDA poor performance issues in extreme cold climates. The ARB method combines the use of heated mixing water, identified as beneficial in the first part of this thesis, with electric heating of the borehole using high-temperature nichrome wire. Experiments conducted in a temperature-controlled chamber at ambient temperatures ranging from -20°C to -60°C on 203.2 mm (8 inch) cubic granite rock samples demonstrate the effectiveness of the ARB method. At -40°C, combining 50°C mixing water with a 25V electric wire heating system reduced the time to first crack (TFC) and minimum demolition time (MDT) to 0.7 and 1.1 hours, respectively. The results of a detailed parametric study confirm the improved performance of the ARB method compared to approaches based solely on individual factors.This thesis contributes to advancing sustainable rock breakage methods for the mining industry by optimizing SCDA performance through tailored operational adjustments and hybrid approaches. The findings offer practical solutions to reduce reliance on explosives, mitigate environmental impacts, and improve operational efficiency in mining operations, particularly in cold climate regions
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".