A book on rock blasting

 

This book is a ready reckoner and handy guide to the purchasers of ammonium nitrate and manufacturers of explosives (containing ammonium nitrate). It is written to facilitate understanding the nature of technical specifications in finalizing purchases of ammonium nitrate. The contents will help the purchasers in emphasizing and asking for the correct parameters of AN from the AN sellers.

The book is released on 25th October 2020, in the formats of eBook and paperback, for purchase. It may be downloaded from kindle unlimited free.

A specification refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material. It is a technical standard.

The specification is important to understand the quality of a material. Customers review the specifications to decide the purchase.

There are different types of technical, engineering, product, process, and services specifications, and the term is used differently in a variety of technical contexts.

Many product development methods describe the product development as a well-structured, sequential flow starting with a requirements specification, or design specification, and ending with a product solution.

Thus establishing a design specification is essential and should be a central issue in design research. Several procedures for creating requirements for a specification are suggested in the literature acknowledging the benefit of having a comprehensive specification at the start of the design process. Furthermore, these works of literature provide some guidelines for the preparation of a good specification i.e. requirements should be unambiguous, solution-independent formulation, clearly linked to customer needs, measurable (qualitative or quantitative).

To ensure the specification is more practical, several authors have distinguished requirements into demand and wishes. However, the contents and form of a specification are different from case to case and are influenced by several factors: the complexity of the factions; complete plant vs. machine component, design difficulty; new design, and development vs. adaptive design, the requirement for additional properties; safety, life, appearance, and problem initiator or sponsor.

To identify a complete set of requirements for a product at the early phase of the design process becomes essential yet impossible in reality. Based on an empirical study, - completeness is a criterion that is basically unachievable. Often new requirements are included as the design process proceeds into the advance state because we do not know the problem fully until the solution is created. The requirements are changed (i.e. developed, explored, and expanded) during the design process into a more complete description or final specification.

In high energy materials like ANFO, Site mix emulsion (SME), Site mix slurry (SMS), package emulsion, and package slurries, the major component is ammonium nitrate. It constitutes about 60 – 95% in the products of different types. So, specifications of AN are important to achieve a good quality of high energy materials.

Manufacturers of ammonium nitrate provide technical specifications to the purchasers and users. Some manufacturers provide detailed specifications. Their specification sheets contain as many as 25 different quality parameters. Some other manufacturers, on the other hand, supply specifications containing as less as four parameters. Thus sometimes it becomes difficult to understand the quality of the ammonium nitrate for specific uses like ANFO, SME, SMS, and so on.

This book is written to serve as a ready reckoner and a handy guide to the manufacturers of explosives (containing ammonium nitrate).

The book aims to understand the nature of the specification finalization during the purchase of ammonium nitrate for use. To achieve these aims the chapters in this book have been written to understand (a) the parameters that influence the development of a good specification in product development in a collaboration project between a manufacturer and the purchaser, (b) the AN manufacturer (seller) define the content of a specification, and (c) mode of specifications used during the design process.

Let us see it for ammonium nitrate. In the next chapter, we have started with a specification of AN having 22 quality parameters. While these parameters are important it is equally important to prune it to fewer parameters that will define all other parameters relevant to explosive manufacture. AN specification is reviewed for parameters and has been made concise, specific, and useful.