Bucket-wheel excavator
continuous digging machine used especially in large-scale open-pit mining
A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.
Their primary function is that of a continuous digging machine in large-scale open-pit mining operations, removing thousands of tons of overburden a day. What sets them apart from other large-scale mining equipment, such as bucket chain excavators, is their use of a large wheel consisting of a continuous pattern of buckets which scoop material as the wheel turns. They are among the largest land or sea vehicles ever produced. The 14,200-ton Bagger 293 holds the Guinness World Record for the heaviest land-based vehicle ever built.
History
Bucket-wheel excavators have been used in mining for the past century, with some of the first being manufactured in the 1920s. They are used in conjunction with many other pieces of mining machinery (conveyor belts, spreaders, crushing stations, heap-leach systems, etc.) to move and mine massive amounts of overburden (waste). While the overall concepts that go into a BWE have not changed much, their size has grown drastically since the end of World War II.
In the 1950s two German mining firms ordered the world's first extremely large BWEs, and had three BWEs built for mining lignite near Cologne, Germany. The German BWEs had a wheel of over 16 m (52 ft) in diameter, weighed 5,500 short tons (5,000 t) and were over 180 m (600 ft) long, with eighteen crawler units for movement and could cut a swath of over 180 m (600 ft) at one time
BWEs built since the 1990s, such as the Bagger 293, have reached sizes as large as 96 m (315 ft) tall, 225 m (738 ft) long, and as heavy as 14,200 t (31,300,000 lb). The bucket-wheel itself can be over 21 m (70 ft) in diameter with as many as 20 buckets, each of which can hold over 15 m3 (20 cu yd) of material.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bucket-wheel 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.