Numerical Simulation of Independent Advance of Ore Breaking in the Non-pillar Sublevel Caving Method

The mechanism of stress generation and propagation by detonation loading in five separate independent ad-vance of ore breaking patterns is discussed in the paper. An elastic numerical model was developed using AN-SYS/LS-DYNA 3D Nonlinear Dynamic Finite Element Software. In this package ANSYS is the preprocessor and LS-DYNA is the postprocessor. Numerical models in the paper to actual were 1:10 and the element mesh was dissected in scanning mode utilizing the symmetry characteristics of the numerical model. Five different advance rates were stud-ied. Parameters,such as the time required to maximum stress,the action time of the available stress,the maximum ve-locity of the nodes,the stress penetration time,the magnitude of the stress peak and the time duration for high stress were numerically simulated. The 2.2 m advance appeared optimum from an analysis of the simulation results. The re-sults from numerical simulation have been validated by tests with physical models.