Evolution and future prospect of scientific objectives of open-pit mining

Surface mining is an important way of mining mineral resources. The state and local governments have put forward higher requirements for surface mining in China. Therefore, it is particularly urgent to take surface mining as a science to carry out systematic research, reveal the laws of mining process and phenomenon occurred, and make scientific explanations. First of all, the major technical achievements in the field of surface mining of solid mineral resources in China in the past 40 years were summarized from three aspects: the basic theory of surface mining, the development of key complete sets of equipment and blasting engineering technology. Then, the modern scientific metrology and information metrology technologies were used to conduct a multivariate dynamic analysis of 7128 papers and reports in the past 40 years, and a multi-dimensional quantitative description of the development and evolution process of the main research topics, including the time dimension, was carried out by the cluster analysis. It is found that the evolution of research topics is the result of the coupling effect of many factors, such as technological development, mining status, policy environment, etc. Based on the sorting of the existing major scientific and technological achievements and the objective literature measurement results, it is pointed out that the goal of the future surface mining science is to form a systematic and comprehensive safe, green, efficient and intelligent surface mining technology system, and the realization path is given, that is, to form a hot research topic of surface mining technology system and major equipment, and to strengthen the deep cross integration between the existing hot research and surface mining technology system and major equipment. It also provides some useful suggestions on how to jointly tackle major scientific and technological problems with the advantageous resources of various themes inside and outside the industry to achieve a substantial collaborative innovation among multiple themes. Finally, from the perspective of energy and ecology, the paper looks forward to the development direction of major basic theories and technologies of the future surface mining science from seven aspects: mining area planning theory, intelligent mining design principle, intelligent cluster scheduling theory, safe and efficient mining technology of coal mining in spontaneous combustion prone extra thick coal seams, high slope stability control technology, efficient belt conveyor transportation technology under complex working conditions, and intelligent surface mine system engineering. The development direction of the future surface mining equipment is prospected from five aspects: high efficiency mobile crushing equipment, modular semi-fixed crushing equipment, continuous mining process system equipment, large inclination transportation equipment and large dump machine. It is expected that the study can be used as a reference for scientists and engineers in the surface mining field.