Review of the granite extraction practices at Seyani international company.

Abstract

The mining industry has been key to the development of civilization. This is due the fact that development and' technology are highly articulated to infrastructure and because of the need for construction materials; stone aggregate, cement, dimension stones, gravel, sand. The extraction of the rock involves stripping to expose the rock, the drilling and blasting from where the rock is reduced in size from its natural state into a size that it can be handled by the machinery and the processed into the required materials: Mining companies must therefore adopt mining operations through which they have to extract the minerals from the ground at lower costs so as to maximize the profits generated. Ali operations should be done in their subsequent order. The purpose of this report the operations involved in granite extinction identifying the lags in the operations -and recommending the appropriate operations at a cost. A geophysical survey of the proposed site of extraction was carried out using a terrameter instrument set so as to know the extent of overburden and the extent of the rock at different points of the site of extraction and a map was developed in GIS software for the co-ordinate points of instrumentation. The current mining operations on site were reviewed that's; stripping and waste management, drilling, blasting and cycle time of operations. The effect of each was explained and the idle time between the operations was also determined. Production and the production in terms of trucks crushed per day was also considered in the project. The project aimed meeting the required production target with in the limited time, machinery and resources available at the quarry. The production target was set at 50 trips per day and was. not achieved, identifying and utilizing all the idle time without considering the crusher delays, seen to improve the production by 40% while making sure that the mean fragmentation size in a range of 20-35cm which would ease loading. and hauling operations since large sized particles where observed to consume longer time of loading, hauling and. crushing. Drilling and blasting parameters where analyzed in the in the excel spreadsheet, keeping the burden in a range of 1.5-1.7m giving a mean fragmentation size of less than 35Cm, implies that the hydraulic rock breaker can thus be used as an exactor by fitting the excavating bucket and thus be in other mining operations, that' s stripping or feeding into the crusher. Stripping should be sufficient. making sure that all the burden soils are transported to the waste damp so as to avoid ore dilution. Mean fragmentation size maintained to easy hauling and crushing. During hauling, the material can be pilled near the crusher to reduce on the crusher-truck time. Material haulage should be continuous, piled near the crusher so as to shorten the travel distance and cycle time. For holes affected with water, the ANFO should be packed in bags, so as to avoid the water dissolving the ANFO.