Varistem® is a patented blast stemming plug for mining, quarrying and civil blasting applications. The plugs contain blast energy for longer, resulting in a range of benefits depending on how it is incorporated into your blast design.
One of the largest financial gains from using the Varistem® blast stemming plugs is an improvement in overall fragmentation. This results in an improvement in loading rates, bucket fill factors, load and haul cycle times, and ultimately crusher throughput. Lheewijt et. al. (2012) 1 conducted a study to determine, amongst other factors, the impact of the use of the Varistem® plugs on crusher throughput at a limestone quarry. Figure 1 presents the crusher throughput results obtained in this study, showing an improvement of between 14% to 19%.
Link to download case study Improving-Gold-Ore-Fragmentation-with-Varistem-Case-Study
