Prediction of Rock Fragmentation Due to Blasting in Sarcheshmeh Copper Mine Using Artificial Neural Networks

The main objective in production blasting is to achieve a proper fragmentation. In this paper, rock fragmentation the Sarcheshmeh copper mine has been predicted by developing a model using artificial neural network. To construct the model, parameters such as burden to spacing ratio, hole-diameter, stemming, total charge-per-delay and point load index have been considered as input parameters. A model with architecture 9-8-5-1 trained by back propagation method was found to be optimum. To compare performance of the neural network, statistical method was also applied. Determination coefficient (R ²) and root mean square error were calculated for both the models, which show absolute superiority of neural network over traditional statistical method.