Abstract. The fracturing and fragmentation of rock blocks are important phenomena that occur ubiquitously during the propagation avalanches. Here, movement a rectangular block characterized by different joint sets along an upper sloped lower horizontal plane is simulated using discrete element method (DEM) models. pattern set allows to break weak planes at onset fragmentation. With this design,...

Valentine and Moores [Valentine JW, Moores EM (1970) Nature 228:657-659] hypothesized that plate tectonics regulates global biodiversity by changing the geographic arrangement of continental crust, but the data required to fully test the hypothesis were not available. Here, we use a global database of marine animal fossil occurrences and a paleogeographic reconstruction model to test the hypoth...

Rock blasting with explosives is the first stage of rock fragmentation and plays a key role in results mining chain. Fragmentation optimization achieved by considering energy efficiency explosive, optimal distribution explosive rocky mass, programmed controlled release during blasting. The quality usually performed using tools that estimate sizes fragments via analysis two- or three-dimensional...

We give a brief introduction to smoothed particle hydrodynamics methods for continuum mechanics. Specifically, we present our 3D SPH code to simulate and analyze collisions of asteroids consisting of two types of material: basaltic rock and ice. We consider effects like brittle failure, fragmentation, and merging in different impact scenarios. After validating our code against previously publis...

Abstract Stemming is one of the main concerns in blast rock engineering due to its impact on explosion energy consumption and excavation performance. In this study, blast-induced fragmentation under different stemming conditions numerically studied using combined numerical modelling image processing. After careful determination parameters constitutive material models, developed model LS-DYNA ve...