The location of an acoustic emission (AE) source is crucial for predicting and controlling potential hazards. In this paper, a novel weighted linear least squares location method for AE sources without measuring wave velocity is proposed. First, the governing equations of each sensor are established according to the sensor coordinates and arrival times. Second, a mean reference equation is established by taking the mean of the squared governing equations. Third, the system of linear equations can be obtained based on the mean reference equation, and their residuals are estimated to obtain their weights. Finally, the AE source coordinate is obtained by weighting the linear equations and inserting the parameter constraint. The AE location method is verified by a pencil lead break experiment, and the results show that the locating accuracy of the proposed method is significantly higher than that of traditional methods. Furthermore, the simulation test proves that the proposed method also has a better performance (location accuracy and stability) than the traditional methods under any given scale of arrival errors.

Previous studies have revealed that toxic gases and dust (smoke dust) are the most common pollutants generated by the blasting operations in open-pit mines, which might lead to a threat to the environment’s condition, health and safety, and properties protection around the blasting site. In order to deal with the problems, a pollution evaluation system was established based on the fractal dimension theory (D_box(P)) and grayscale average algorithm (G_a) in digital image-processing technology to recognize and analyze the distributions of the smoke-dust cloud, and subsequently determine the pollution degrees. The computation processes of D_box(P) and G_a indicate three fitted correlations between the parameters and diffusion time of smoke dust. Then, a pollution index (Pi) is put forward to integrate the global and local features of D_box(P) and G_a, and develop a hazard classification mechanism for the blasting pollutants. Results obviously denote three diffusion stages of the pollutants, mainly including generation stage, cloud-formation stage, and diffusion stage. In addition, it has been validated that the proposed system can also be utilized in single-point areas within a whole digital image. Besides, there are variation trends of the thresholds T₁ and T₂ in binarization with the diffusion of pollutants. With this identification and evaluation system, the pollution condition of smoke dust can be obviously determined and analyzed.

Tunnels are commonly excavated using drilling and blasting methods, and the surrounding rock is greatly affected by the vibration of surrounding hole blasting. To study the influence of the number of free surfaces on the energy distribution and attenuation law of surrounding hole blasting vibration signals, on-site experiments and numerical simulation experiments were conducted. The research results indicate that the higher the number of free surfaces, the smaller the peak vibration velocity. The longitudinal Fourier main frequency decreases with the distance from the monitoring point. The more free surface, the greater the centroid frequency and zero crossing frequency. In addition, numerical simulation shows that the degree of rock fragmentation after blasting increases with the increase of the number of free surface of rock.