PURPOSE:  The purpose of this project is to develop a suite of protocols that a blaster or mine inspector can use in the field to determine if a high explosive, blasting agent, or emulsion oxidizer are of a poor quality that could lead to an accident.

RESEARCH SUMMARY:  The explosive manufacturing business is currently very competitive. Manufactures must hold down cost of their products to maintain their share of the market. In this effort to hold down costs for explosive manufacture, quality control may suffer. With poor quality control, an explosive that is classified by DOT as a blasting agent may in reality be a high explosive. Transportation and storage requirements for high explosives are more stringent than those for the less sensitive blasting agents. Treating a high explosive as a blasting agent could lead to serious accidents. Alternatively, if a high explosive is too insensitive due to a manufacturing error, misfires will result. Protocols for evaluating the safety of explosives currently exist, but for all practical purposes these tests cannot be conducted in the field if a blaster or inspector has concerns about the quality of the blasting agent or explosive being used. PRL is developing a simplified protocol for evaluating explosive quality, and hence safety. This will not be a replacement for the original, extensive protocols. The simplified protocol will be a screening test to detect the most common hazards related to explosive quality. There will necessarily be a tradeoff between the complexity of the protocol and the ability to identify hazards. Preliminary results suggest that tests to determine detonation velocity, explosive density, and detonability by a blasting cap are practical for conduct in the field and will go a long way towards verifying whether an explosive is performing as expected. Upon completion of this project, blasters will have a way to verify that an explosive will shoot as expected, before it can result in a poor blast that would have serious safety ramifications.

Partners/collaborator in the project is the Mine Safety and Health Administration.