Study on wettability of water stemming for blasting dust adjusted by surfactants and inorganic salts

There is still a lack of methods for rapid optimization of water stemming components with high wettability. Herein, blasting dust was collected from a tunnel in Chongqing (China) to investigate its removal performance by different water stemmings.

The two most important components of blasting dust were SiO2 and CaCO3 by characterization analysis. Notably, hydrophilic blasting dust has significantly more SiO2 than hydrophobic blasting dust. The DFTdensity flood theory calculation predicted the wettability of water stemming containing sucrose fatty acid ester (SE) higher than that of water stemming containing other surfactants.