Continuous surface miner

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The Continuous Surface Miner (CSM) is a continuously working opencast mining device, where the rock is crushed by milling with the help of a rotating roller. In addition to shredding, the roller often also functions as a load on a conveyor (e.g. conveyor belt ).

CSM loading a truck

Historical

The CSM originally comes from road construction and was mainly used for milling road surfaces and civil engineering projects in difficult conditions (e.g. civil engineering sites in hard rock where blasting could not be carried out). Wirtgen GmbH was a pioneer in the 1980s . Due to the possibility of extracting hard rock without blasting, the CSM penetrated more and more into the mining industry , so that today they can be counted among the opencast mining equipment . The mining CSM differ from the CSM used in road construction in that they break down solid rock and the roller is higher and wider.

construction

Basically, the CSM are differentiated according to the arrangement of the milling drum :

Chisels are attached to the milling drum. Classic round shank chisels and disc chisels are used here . In addition, guide plates can be attached to the milling drum, which transports the milled material to the center of the drum , like a screw conveyor , where it is fed into a chute or a conveyor belt .

The arrangement and direction of rotation of the milling drum influence the recoverable rock strength , the maximum cutting height, the vibration behavior and free cutting behavior of the machine.

CSM can also be distinguished according to whether they are equipped with a discharge boom or whether they deposit the milled material directly behind them. If the material is deposited directly (so-called swathing), the conveying capacity increases, but this leads to additional work steps, as the material must also be pushed together with bulldozers and loaded onto trucks by wheel loaders .

As a rule, CSMs are equipped with crawler tracks.

Advantages and disadvantages

The advantages of the CSM over other opencast mining equipment include: a .:

  • Combination of loosening, breaking and possibly loading in one work step (integration of many work steps in one machine, which has a favorable effect on the extraction costs)
  • relatively low investment costs
  • high operational mobility and flexibility
  • Extraction of rocks up to 120 MPa
  • high selectivity (i.e. precise cutting along the layer boundaries with an accuracy of up to 5 cm)

The disadvantages are:

  • many shunting trips lead to a comparatively high proportion of empty trips
  • relatively high wear costs
  • low overall performance compared to other opencast mining equipment
  • compared to other open-cast mining equipment, it has little removal thickness

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