Prediction of blast-induced flyrock in Indian limestone mines using neural networks

Frequency and scale of the blasting events are increasing to boost limestone production. Mines areapproaching close to inhabited areas due to growing population and limited availability of land resourceswhich has challenged the management to go for safe blasts with special reference to opencast mining.The study aims to predict the distance covered by the flyrock induced by blasting using artificial neuralnetwork （ANN） and multi-variate regression analysis （MVRA） for better assessment. Blast design andgeotechnical parameters, such as linear charge concentration, burden, stemming length, specific charge,unconfined compressive strength （UCS）, and rock quality designation （RQD）, have been selected as inputparameters and flyrock distance used as output parameter. ANN has been trained using 95 datasets ofexperimental blasts conducted in 4 opencast limestone mines in India. Thirty datasets have been used fortesting and validation of trained neural network. Flyrock distances have been predicted by ANN, MVRA,as well as further calculated using motion analysis of flyrock projectiles and compared with the observeddata. Back propagation neural network （BPNN） has been proven to be a superior predictive tool whencompared with MVRA. 2014 Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Production and hosting byElsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation in Jungar Banner of China during 2000–2017

It is known that the exploitation of opencast coal mines has seriously damaged the environments in the semi-arid areas.Vegetation status can reliably reflect the ecological degeneration and restoration in the opencast mining areas in the semi-arid areas.Long-time series MODIS NDVI data are widely used to simulate the vegetation cover to reflect the disturbance and restoration of local ecosystems.In this study, both qualitative(linear regression method and coefficient of variation(CoV)) and quantitative(spatial buffer analysis, and change amplitude and the rate of change in the average NDVI) analyses were conducted to analyze the spatio-temporal dynamics of vegetation during 2000–2017 in Jungar Banner of Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, China, at the large(Jungar Banner and three mine groups) and small(three types of functional areas: opencast coal mining excavation areas, reclamation areas and natural areas) scales.The results show that the rates of change in the average NDVI in the reclamation areas(20%–60%) and opencast coal mining excavation areas(10%–20%) were considerably higher than that in the natural areas(<7%).The vegetation in the reclamation areas experienced a trend of increase(3–5 a after reclamation)-decrease(the sixth year of reclamation)-stability.The vegetation in Jungar Banner has a spatial heterogeneity under the influences of mining and reclamation activities.The ratio of vegetation improvement area to vegetation degradation area in the west, southwest and east mine groups during 2000–2017 was 8:1, 20:1 and 33:1, respectively.The regions with the high CoV of NDVI above 0.45 were mainly distributed around the opencast coal mining excavation areas, and the regions with the CoV of NDVI above 0.25 were mostly located in areas with low(28.8%) and medium-low(10.2%) vegetation cover.The average disturbance distances of mining activities on vegetation in the three mine groups(west, southwest and east) were 800, 800 and 1000 m, respectively.The greater the scale of mining, the farther the disturbance distances of mining activities on vegetation.We conclude that vegetation reclamation will certainly compensate for the negative impacts of opencast coal mining activities on vegetation.Sufficient attention should be paid to the proportional allocation of plant species(herbs and shrubs) in the reclamation areas, and the restored vegetation in these areas needs to be protected for more than 6 a.Then, as the repair time increased, the vegetation condition of the reclamation areas would exceed that of the natural areas.