Analysis of predictor equations for determining the blast-induced vibration in rock blasting

The paper proposes a new empirical correlation designed to complement the “site laws” currently used to evaluate the attenuation in the rock masses of vibrations induced by rock blasting. The formula contains a deformed exponential known as the K-exponential, which seems to well represent a large number of both natural and artificial phenomena ranging from astrophysics to quantum mechanics, with some extension in the field of economics and finance. Experimental validation of the formula was performed via the analysis of vibration data covering a number of case studies, which differed in terms of both operation and rock type. A total of 12 experimental cases were analysed and the proposed formulation exhibited a good performance in 11 of them. In particular, the proposed law, which was built using blast test data, produced very good approximations of the points representing the vibration measurements and would thus be useful in organising production blasts. However, the developed formula was found to work less well when a correlation obtained for a given site was applied to another presenting similar types of rocks and operations, and thus should not be employed in the absence of measurements from test data.