Experimental Study on the Blasting Performance of Water-Soil Composite Stemming in Underground Mines

Top stemming is necessary to stop the explosive energy from escaping through the upper part of blast-holes in cutting blasts of large-diameter deep-hole blasting in underground mines. The often-used single soil stemming frequently leads to material clogging which results in reduction of blasting efficiency. In this paper, a new water-soil composite stemming is proposed to solve the problem. A series of small-scale tests were conducted on solid concrete masonry blocks to investigate the effect of top stemming material and stemming length on blasting performance. The experimental results indicated that water stemming was worse at improving the utilization rate of the explosion energy compared with single soil stemming of the same length. Further, the mean fragment size decreased with the increase of stemming length for single water stemming. Three schemes of water-soil composite stemming were designed and the scheme with soil in the lower part and water filled in bags in the higher part had the best fragmentation. The water-soil composite stemming was applied in underground stopes, and field results indicated that the newly proposed stemming led to similar rock fragmentation with traditional single soil stemming, but greatly reduced the clogged blast hole ratio, thus effectively improving blasting and mining efficiency.