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S Africa explosives expert building brand awareness in North America

23rd September 2016

By: Kimberley Smuts

Creamer Media Reporter

  

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Explosives firm BME, as part of its geographical growth strategy, will attend this year’s MINExpo International exhibition and conference from September 26 to 28 at the Las Vegas Convention Centre, in Nevada, in the US.

The company’s globalisation strategy includes increasing brand awareness in the North American market and BME sees MINExpo as a great platform to build awareness of the company and its digital initiation system AXXIS.

BME will demonstrate its AXXIS digital initiation system and blasting software, BlastMap III, in South Hall. BlastMap III is a blast design program that works in conjunction with AXXIS, the development of which started in the early 2000s.

BME MD Joseph Keenan notes that its AXXIS system currently holds the world record for the biggest blast using electronic detonators, which took place in December at the Daunia opencut coal mine, in the north-eastern state of Queensland, Australia.

The company is supplying its AXXIS detonators to a Colombian mining operation and also continues to supply Singapore’s Thomson-East Coast Line rail project.

The South Africa-developed AXXIS electronic digital initiation system is highly accurate and features timing flexibility between detonations, explains BME. The system includes patented intelligent connectors and advanced loggers to establish connector identification and the firing time for each detonator. It also comprises a low-energy tester to quickly find leakage points or shorts in a detonator network, a blasting box and a dedicated software program.

For safety, AXXIS offers two-way communication between the blasting box and detonators during detonator logging. However, BME technical director Tony Rorke notes that there is no direct electric current or powering up of the detonators themselves during detonator logging.

Additionally, Keenan states: “We are also working on the development of a new underground centralised blasting system that uses BME’s AXXIS electronic delay detonators.” This project is currently in the trial phase.

The purpose of the centralised blasting system is to enable mines to blast all underground workings simultaneously when all staff have cleared these areas. This ensures safety and prevents people from being accidentally caught in blast fumes.

The centralised blasting system allows for programmable AXXIS electronic delay detonators to be used. Therefore, complex blast timing sequences can be applied through the flexibility of the programmable detonators. Additional safety is assured, as the detonators cannot be fired without the input of specific encoded fire commands.

Many centralised blasting systems can fire only nonelectric initiation systems, thus preventing the two-way communication that is enabled by AXXIS electronic detonators. Knowing the status of each and every AXXIS detonator on the system allows for awareness of a problem on a blast before it is fired, thereby allowing the initiation of that particular blast to be aborted without aborting all the other blasts.

Meanwhile, BME has successfully implemented its first complete emulsion explosives delivery system for narrow reef underground workings using a pipe system, which BME has been working on since 2014. The company explains that it has successfully implemented the system at dual-listed gold mining company Gold One’s operations in Johannesburg, South Africa, consisting of a 318 m vertical emulsion pipeline, the longest in the world, from the surface to underground silos.

As a result of extensive testing, BME explains that the emulsion explosives delivery system can now safely transport BME’s emulsion along a 1 000 m vertical feed. This is made possible by robust emulsion formulations that allow for multiple pumping cycles and pipeline transportation.

The purpose of the pipeline technology is to safely deliver emulsions to underground working faces at deeper depths than were previously possible.

Piping of emulsion from the surface to underground storage tanks improves logistical efficiencies and has numerous benefits for underground operations, such as increased shaft availability, fewer explosives cars, less congestion at shaft stations, reduced labour and operational expenditure, faster and streamlined delivery to working faces, and the improved recording of explosives distribution.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

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