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Science and Technology of Energetic Materials

Vol.66, No.5 (2005)Special Issue for ISEM 2005

Research paper

Study on Blasting Rock into Soil for Greening the Desert
Kaname Shirotani, Katsumi Katoh, Shiro Kubota, Yuji Wada, Yuji Ogata, Shuzo Fujiwara, and Mitsuru Arai
p.384-388

Abstract

Greening of desert area is one of the important actions to fix CO2 and mitigate the global warming. However, greening of rock desert, which is the main part of dried area on the earth, is not an easy task, because it takes more than 10,000 years by natural process.

We suppose rock-blasting may expand useful soil area for plants with higher pace. Ammonium nitrate and fuel oil (ANFO) is the most popular explosive for industrial blasting because of its reasonable price and low sensitivity. We thought this explosive might have ability to crush rock into soil level particles (less than 2 mm) immediately and to spread AN as a nutritional element for plants into the particles. In order to obtain an understanding of effectiveness of using explosives to crush rock into soil particle size and spread nutrition ions, particle distribution and content of nitrogen ions, NH4+, NO2-, and NO3-, in products from blasting 30 cm cubic model of granite at various loading conditions were investigated.

As a result, two things were founded. One is that proportion of very fine particles such as less than 0.020 mm, which qualify the balance between the particles and water, could be controlled by loading conditions such as contact surface area between explosive and rock, tamping, and detonation velocity of explosive. Another was that the blasting with ANFO can spread nutritional ions, NH4+, NO2- and NO3-, into particles. Especially, the contents of NH4+ and NO3- can be controlled by the amount of ANFO whether the blast holes are tamped or not.

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Keywords

ANFO, Desert, Greening, Blasting, Particle size distribution, Nutritional ions

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