Process and apparatus for the manufacture of emulsion explosive

Explosive and thermic compositions or charges – Processes of making

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102313, D03D 2300, F42B 300

Patent

active

061652970

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BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to a process and apparatus for the manufacture of explosives.
Civilian mining, quarrying and excavation industries commonly use bulk or packaged explosives as the principal sources of power for breaking rocks and ore for mining, building tunnels, excavating and similar activities.
The majority of emulsion explosives currently in use in these industries comprise non-explosive materials such as hydrocarbon fuels and water which are formed into emulsions and then sensitised to make them detonable emulsion explosives. In most countries emulsion explosives have virtually replaced nitroglycerine based explosives.
In the mining industry, rock is commonly fractured by drilling blastholes then filling them with bulk or packaged emulsion explosives which are subsequently detonated. Emulsion explosives are supplied to users in either bulk form or packaged in cartridges or bags.
Packaged emulsion explosives are manufactured and packaged at factories and transported to the site at which they are to be used and loaded into blastholes by hand. Packaged emulsion explosives are significantly more expensive than bulk emulsion explosives and tend to be preferred for small scale applications or for use in wet blastholes where the packaging prevents moisture ingress and concomitant degradation of the emulsion explosives. Conversely bulk emulsion explosives are preferred for large scale applications such as large mine sites where many hundreds of tonnes of explosives may be needed for a single blast. Bulk explosives are either manufactured and sensitised at a manufacturing factory and transported in a specially designed truck to the site of use or mixed on-site in manufacturing units located on trucks (called mobile manufacturing units or MMU's).
MMU's are effectively explosive factories on wheels. Each MMU is designed and built to produce and deliver specified bulk emulsion explosive from a manufacturing unit based on a conventional truck chassis. MMU's are able to carry to a mine site large quantities of precursors for manufacture of emulsion explosives on the mine bench. The precursors include materials such as unsensitised emulsion, particulate oxidiser salts and sensitising agents such as glass microballoons which materials are non-explosive and can be safely transported on public roads. Because the MMU's do not transport emulsion explosives per se, there is no need for compliance with the strict legislative requirements applied to transport of emulsion explosives. It is only when the unsensitised emulsion is combined with sensitising agents at the mine bench that an emulsion explosive is formed.
The transport trucks and MMU's are provided with mechanised means for loading bulk emulsion explosives into blastholes at high discharge rates; the loading is usually carried out by either auguring, pouring, pumping or pneumatically blowing emulsion explosives into blastholes. The method used depends on the type of product and the size of the blasthole to be filled. The larger transport trucks and MMU's are designed to deliver hundreds of tonnes of emulsion explosives in a single run at a loading rate of between 70 and 1000 kg per minute.
Most of the emulsion explosives in common use are based on water-in-oil emulsions. These formulations were first disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,447,978 (Bluhm) and comprise as components: aqueous solution of inorganic oxygen-releasing salts: droplets are dispersed: solution throughout the continuous organic phase; and optionally
In some emulsion explosive compositions the water content in the oxidiser phase may be reduced to very low levels, for example less than 4%. Formulations in which water has been eliminated from the oxidiser phase are called melt-in-oil emulsion explosives and have been described in many patent specifications such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,644. The term emulsion as used herein refers to water-in-oil emulsions and melt-in-oil emulsions.
Emulsion explosives are often blended with a solid particulate oxidiser salt such as ammonium nitrate (AN) prills or part

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Derwent WPAT Online AbstractAccession No. 88-31491/45, CN, A, 8602842 (Mining Res Inst) Oct. 28, 1987.

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