There is not much difference between drilling underground and on surface, but while drilling underground few more things should be considered.
While selecting your rock drilling tools for mining, following few differences between surface drilling and underground drilling must be taken onto account.
- Objectives can be different
While drilling underground, usually focus remains on early completion of the drilling and therefore drilling speed is very important consideration.
Hence, while choosing your drilling equipment for underground operation makes sure that the rotation speed must be higher, so that it can penetrate the ground at a much better rate.
- Difference between known and unknown ground
While drilling on any known ground, the drilling person will know which drill bit to use, as many holes were drilled earlier too. However, while you are drilling within a mine which may be unknown ground and hence many often you may not be too sure about your drill bit.
So, you must know about the unknown ground before choosing your drilling equipment.
- Depth of your bore holes
In any construction and related industries, perhaps the depth of your drilling may not be too deep however while drilling underground the drilling depth requirement can be much higher.
Due to this reason, you will have to select a high-powered drill that can penetrate much greater depth of hole.
- Direction of boreholes
While drilling underground, often you need to drill up, down or in angular fashion as the need arises. Therefore, you need to choose such drilling equipment that can be used for drilling at different directions.
- Low powered drill rigs
Underground drilling will typically, provide less amount of space for the drill rigs and hence usually they will be smaller with less power. While drilling with low-powered drill rig, particularly in up hole, you need core bit with softer matrix.
The softer matrix will have diamonds which are easily exposed that can allow your core bit to remain sharp and cut well to provide a very good penetration rate while using equipment, which does not allow you required feed pressure.
