Evaluating and predicting blast-induced ground vibration in open-cast mine using ANN: a case study in Vietnam

Abstract

Blasting is one of the cheapest and effective methods for breaking rock mass in open-pit mines. However, its side effects are not small such as ground vibration (PPV), air overpressure, fly rock, back break, dust, and toxic. Of these side effects, blast-induced PPV is the most dangerous for the human and surrounding environment. Therefore, evaluating and accurately forecasting blast-induced PPV is one of the most challenging issues facing open-pit mines today. In this paper, a series of artificial neural network models were applied to predict blast-induced PPV in an open-pit coal mine of Vietnam; 68 blasting events were used in this study for development of the ANN models. Of the whole dataset, 80% (approximately 56 observations) were used for the training process, and the rest of 20% (12 observations) were used for the testing process. Five ANN models were developed in this study with the difference in the number of hidden layers. The ANN 2-5-1; ANN 2-8-6-1; ANN 2-5-3-1; ANN 2-8-6-4-1; and ANN 2-10-8-5-1 models were considered in this study. An empirical technique was also conducted to estimate blast-induced PPV and compared to the constructed ANN models. For evaluating the performance of the models, root-mean-squared error (RMSE) and determination coefficient (R2) were used. The results indicated that the ANN 2-10-8-5-1 model (10 neurons in the first hidden layer, 8 neurons in the second hidden layer, and 5 neurons for the third hidden layer) yielded a superior performance over the other models with an RMSE of 0.738 and R2 of 0.964. In contrast, the empirical performed poorest performance with an RMSE of 2.670 and R2 of 0.768. This study is a new approach to predict blast-induced PPV in open-cast mines aim to minimize the adverse effects of blasting operations on the surrounding environment.