An electric-blast system for rock fragmentation

Abstract

High-voltage pulse-discharges in water are used to generate pressure-pulses for various applications such as rock fragmentation, concrete block destruction and paint removal from electrostatic-painting processes. Plasma blasting technology utilizes the electrohydraulic effect of a high-voltage electric-discharge in liquid. The plasma channel formed by the discharge in the blast zone has very high temperature resulting in pulse pressure. It transfers the pulse pressure through a noncompressed liquid media to hard solid-surroundings to be destroyed. The advantages of this blast over chemical explosives are the absence of harmful gas pollution, low vibration blast and no requirement of explosion permission as in the case of dynamite use. This paper presents a design of an experimental setup for rock fragmentation by the electrically generated pulse-pressure and the experimental results.