• Explosives and Blasting
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.29-50
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• 2015

Safe blast criteria based on the concept of scaled distances can be obtained from the statistical analysis on measured peak particle velocity data of blast vibrations. Two types of scaled distance widely used in Korea are the square root scaled distance (SRSD) and cube root scaled distance (CRSD). In contrast to SRSD scheme, however, the function of maximum charge per delay for CRSD increases without bound after the intersection point of these two functions despite of the similar goodness of fits. To prevent structural damage that may be caused by the excessive charge in the case of CRSD, it is suggested that CRSD be used within a specified distance slightly beyond the intersection point. On the other hand, there are several attempts that predict vibration level(VL) from the peak particle velocity(PPV) or estimate VL based on the scaled distances without considering their frequency spectra. It appears that these attempts are conducted in blasting contracts only for the purpose of satisfying the environment-related law, which mainly deals with the annoyance aspects of noises and vibrations in human life. But, in principle there could no correlation between peaks of velocity and acceleration over entire frequency spectrum. Therefore, such correlations or estimations should be conducted only between the waves with the same or very similar frequency spectra. Finally, it is a known fact that structural damage due to ground vibration is related to PPV level, the safety level criteria for structures should be defined by allowable PPV levels together with their zero crossing frequencies (ZCF).