Kirra Design



Browser-Based 3D Blast & Mine Design
Brent Buffham · blastingapps.com · kirra-design.com
ISEE Chapter Event · April 2026
The Problem

Blast design software is expensive, closed, and tied to legacy platforms

Commercial tools cost tens of thousands per licence annually. They lock your data in proprietary formats, require desktop installs, and haven't fundamentally changed in decades.
$$$
Annual licence costs
🔒
Proprietary formats
💻
Desktop-only installs
🐌
Slow to innovate
The Solution

What is Kirra?

A free, browser-based application for 3D blast design and mine design — built by a blasting professional, for blasting professionals.
Capabilities

Key Features

📐

Pattern Design

Create blast patterns with configurable burden, spacing, hole angles, and sub-drill. Pattern templates for common layouts.

⏱️

Timing & Tie-up

Visual tie-in editor with delay assignment. Surface and in-hole delay support. Real-time timing contours.

💥

Charge Loading

Multi-deck charge designs with stemming, air decks, and product selection. Automatic mass and volume calculations.

📊

Blast Analytics

GPU shader-powered PPV prediction, damage contours, and borehole pressure analysis at interactive frame rates.

🌐

3D Visualisation

Three.js powered 3D scene with surfaces, holes, and annotations. Dark and light themes. 2D/3D toggle.

📁

File I/O

Import and export CSV, KAP, Surpac STR/DTM, Shapefile, LAS, AQM, SPF, CBLAST, and more.

Design

Blast Pattern Design

Design patterns directly on surfaces or flat planes. Edit individual holes or selections. Move, rotate, and snap to benches.
  • Rectangular, staggered, and custom pattern templates
  • Individual hole editing — length, diameter, angle, dip, bearing
  • Multi-select and bulk property editing
  • Sub-drill and stemming auto-calculation
📐
[Live demo / screenshot]
Timing

Timing & Tie-up Design

Visually connect holes with surface and in-hole delays. See timing contours update in real time.
Note: File format outputs are still largely untested against live field data. The <CRC> DaveyTronic (BPD) export has not yet been fully solutioned. If any suppliers or users would like to provide their format specifications, I am happy to incorporate them — please reach out via blastingapps.com.
Electronic Timing in Kirra
Electronic Timing & Tie-up in Kirra
Real-time delay assignment with visual connectors and timing contours
Analytics

GPU-Powered Blast Analytics

Kirra's analytics engine uses WebGPU fragment shaders and Web Workers to compute blast predictions at interactive frame rates.
🌊

Blair & Minchinton PPV

Time-domain PPV prediction. "Blair Lite" as a GPU fragment shader for real-time display. "Blair Heavy" on CPU with row-level checkpointing.

🔴

Scaled Heelan & Damage

Damage contours computed from vibration models. Visualise damage zones per hole and across the pattern.

💨

Borehole Pressure

Chapman-Jouguet detonation pressure with decoupled charge coupling ratio corrections. DataTexture GPU packing.

Blair Heavy PPV in Kirra
Blair & Minchinton Heavy PPV
Time-domain peak particle velocity prediction with row-level checkpointing
Safety

Flyrock Modelling

Predict flyrock throw distances and visualise 3D ballistic envelopes around every blast hole — helping engineers set exclusion zones with confidence.
Flyrock Shroud in Kirra
3D Flyrock Shroud Modelling
Chernigovskii ballistic envelope over blast pattern — Richards & Moore, Lundborg, and McKenzie algorithms
Visualisation

The Temporal Life-Cycle Shader

One of the most powerful features — watch the life of a blast hole unfold in time. Based on an idea from a spreadsheet created 16 years ago.
  • Initiation from collar or toe, propagation along the charge
  • Damage zones visible in real time — crest vs toe differences
  • Neighbouring holes receiving damage before they detonate
  • Full 3D time-playback of the entire blast sequence
Temporal Life-Cycle Shader
Full playback — watch initiation, detonation, and damage propagation unfold in real time
Interoperability

Speaks Your File Formats

Kirra reads and writes formats from across the industry — no data lock-in.
CSV DXF KAP KAD Surpac STR Surpac DTM ESRI Shapefile LAS (LiDAR) OBJ PLY GLTF KML / KMZ GeoTIFF Point Cloud XYZ SPF (ShotPlus) IKN (Orica) DigiShot (DetNet) BPD (DaveyTronic) CBLAST AQM (Minestar) IREDES MWD XML Wenco NAV Epiroc Surface Manager

In progress. Coming soon.

Deswik .duf Datamine .dm Vulcan .00t
Charging

Powerful Charging Tools

Design complex multi-deck charge configurations with a visual deck builder, manage explosive products, and generate print-ready loading sheets.
  • Visual deck builder with stemming, air decks, and multiple charge columns
  • Product manager for explosive density, VOD, and energy properties
  • Print-ready loading sheets and blast reports as PDF
  • Real-time mass and volume calculations per hole and per pattern
2D Charging Graphic

2D Charging Graphic

Unique per-hole cross-section — instantly see decks, stemming, air gaps, and product fills at a glance.

Deck Builder in Kirra
Visual Deck Builder
Multi-deck charge design with stemming, air decks, and product assignment
Product Manager in Kirra
Product Manager
Define explosive products with density, VOD, and energy — assign to decks across selections
Print Templates in Kirra
Print Templates
Professional loading sheets and blast reports — customisable PDF output with hole-by-hole summaries
Under the Hood

Technology Stack

Built entirely with modern web technologies. No server required — everything runs in the browser.
Three.js
3D rendering
Vite
Build tooling
WebGPU
GPU compute shaders
Web Workers
Background processing
Tauri v2
Desktop wrapper
JavaScript
Core language
Solo-developed with an estimated 3,500+ hours of engineering. All code and work by Brent Buffham.
Licence

Free for the Industry

Kirra is available at no cost. The goal is to provide a professional-grade alternative to expensive commercial blast design tools — accessible to everyone from grad engineers to experienced practitioners.
$0
Licence cost
🌐
Browser-based
6
Languages
What's Next

Roadmap

Support for as Many Formats as Available

Continuously expanding file format support — from drill & blast systems to mine planning packages — so Kirra can read and write data from any workflow.

Limited Block Model Ingestion & Display

Import and visualise block models for ore grade context, enabling blast designs informed by geology directly within the 3D scene.

Perfect the Triangulation System

Maturing the trimesh-boolean library for robust open-mesh CSG — surface intersections, pit design cut-fills, and reliable boolean operations.

Improve UI/UX & Stability

Refining the user interface, streamlining workflows, and hardening stability across large datasets and edge cases.






Thank You

Questions & Discussion
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Brent Buffham · X:@blastingapps
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