Powder Factor

Today we are going to talk about what role powder factor plays in our day-to-day applications of drilling and blasting.

Powder factor is expressed in many different forms. Essentially it is a measurement of explosives per quantity of rock. The typical variation of this that we use on a daily basis is how many pounds of explosives per cubic yard of rock. This gives us a baseline of how we need to go about fragmenting rock for each particular application. A baseline for powder factor or a standard number typically is one pound of explosives per cubic yard of rock. This would be a powder factor of one.

We use powder factor to measure pounds per yard to achieve specific results from the blast. This is similar to how you would measure the speed on the freeway in miles per hour or feet per second in order to reach a specific destination in a certain amount of time.

Now that you know what powder factor is, in the coming blog posts we’ll discuss how we manipulate powder factor and use it to design each of our blasts. Powder factor is really what all drilling and blasting projects are built off of, with no exceptions.