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📊 Blast Vibration Control
Every quarry, tunnel drive and controlled demolition near housing runs into the same limit: not how much rock you can break, but how much the neighbours' walls are allowed to move. Delay detonation is the lever — it cuts the charge per delay without cutting total explosive. And the counterintuitive part: low-frequency ground motion is the dangerous kind.
Blast
Site & Receiver
Live Result
—
Scaled distance R/√W—
Peak particle velocity—
USBM limit at this frequency—
Utilization—
Max charge per delay allowed—
Min standoff for this charge—
Powered by square-root scaled-distance attenuation
with USBM RI 8507 damage limits (
engine/blast-vibration.js).
Verified before publishing by round-trip: the computed maximum charge per
delay, fed back through the attenuation law, returns exactly the target PPV —
and the same holds for the minimum-standoff calculation. Note this uses
SQUARE-root scaling for ground vibration, which is different from the
cube-root scaling used for air-blast overpressure in
engine/blast.js; conflating the two is a common and consequential
error. K and n are site constants from real monitoring regression, not
universal values — they are inputs here for exactly that reason.Method
USBM RI 8507Siskind et al. (1980) — frequency-dependent safe PPV limits for residential structures, from a large field study of blast-induced cracking.
AttenuationPPV = K·(R/√W)^(−n), with W the charge PER DELAY — which is why delay detonation is the primary control measure.
Scope: ground vibration only. Does NOT cover airblast/overpressure, flyrock, or effects on sensitive equipment, historic structures, or people — all of which have thresholds well below residential structural damage. Human perception begins around 0.5 mm/s, so complaints reliably arrive long before any cracking risk.