Bucket chain excavator
a bucket excavator belongs to a group of excavators with several working elements that are structurally predestined for excavating rock mass by means of a large number of buckets that are evenly distributed on an endless chain
A bucket chain excavator (BCE) is a piece of heavy equipment used in surface mining and dredging. BCEs use buckets on a revolving chain to remove large quantities of material. They are similar to bucket-wheel excavators and trenchers. Bucket chain excavators remove material from below their plane of movement, which is useful if the pit floor is unstable or underwater.
History
The first documented use of a bucket chain excavator was in 1859 by Alphonse Couvreux, a French entrepreneur. Several Couvreux BCEs were used in the construction of the Suez Canal.
Overview
A bucket chain excavator works similarly to a bucket wheel excavator, using a series of buckets to dig into the material before dumping it in the bucket chute and depositing it through a discharge boom. The primary difference is that the buckets are mounted on a flexible chain similarly to a chainsaw blade rather than on a rigid wheel. BCEs are used primarily to excavate material below the vehicle's superstructure while bucket wheel excavators focus primarily on excavating top soil overburden and/or resources.
BCEs vary in range and size, although the majority of them are extremely large, with some capable of excavating 14,500 m3/h.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bucket chain excavator” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.