Analysis of predictor equations for determining the blast-induced vibration in rock blasting

The paper proposes a new empirical correlation designed to complement the ‘‘site laws” currently used toevaluate the attenuation in the rock masses of vibrations induced by rock blasting. The formula contains adeformed exponential known as the K-exponential, which seems to well represent a large number of bothnatural and artificial phenomena ranging from astrophysics to quantum mechanics, with some extensionin the field of economics and finance. Experimental validation of the formula was performed via the anal-ysis of vibration data covering a number of case studies, which differed in terms of both operation androck type. A total of 12 experimental cases were analysed and the proposed formulation exhibited a goodperformance in 11 of them. In particular, the proposed law, which was built using blast test data, pro-duced very good approximations of the points representing the vibration measurements and would thusbe useful in organising production blasts. However, the developed formula was found to work less wellwhen a correlation obtained for a given site was applied to another presenting similar types of rocks andoperations, and thus should not be employed in the absence of measurements from test data.