ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 16 -- United States Patent no. 12,305,969, issued on May 20, was assigned to Orica International Pte Ltd (Singapore).
"Blast design" was invented by Angelo Labriola III (Melbourne, Australia), Stuart Hawke (Melbourne, Australia) and Mateus Rocha (Melbourne, Australia).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A process for improved blast design including the steps of: acquiring geological data about a blast site from multiple data sources; extracting one or more blastability labels from the geological data; mapping the blastability labels in two or three dimensions; designing a pattern of blast holes based on the mapping; designing explosive for each blast hole based on the blastabi...