Caterpillar Inc Heavy Equipment CSR by GineersNow Engineering GineersNow Engineering Magazine November 2016 | Page 23

Photo by TwisterSifter
WORLD’S LARGEST
LAND VEHICLE
If you think you’ve seen the world’s
largest land vehicle and it’s not an
excavator, think again.
Currently holding the world’s biggest
land vehicle is the Bagger 288
excavator which is built by Krupp
(now ThyssenKrupp) of Germany
and now owned and operated by
RWE AG, a large utility company.
The bucket wheel excavator is
intimidatingly humongous at 311
feet in height, 705 feet in length and
46,600 tons – in contrast, Titanic was
46,328 tons. It takes five people to
operate it having a 70-foot diameter
bucket wheel, with 20 buckets that
can scoop earth material of over 530
cubic feet. In a day, the Bagger
288 can process 100,000 cubic
yards of material equivalent to
2,500 truckloads.
The original function of this earth
digger is to work in open-pit coal
mines in Germany, which might
be in halt with country mandating
a shutdown of all German coal
mining by 2018. Its design and
manufacture took five years, not
including the assembly which is
another five years, totalling to a
cost of $100 for its production.
Being a huge vehicle has its
downsides – it can only go one-
third of a mile per hour on 3 rows
of caterpillar track assembles.
Moreover, every highway it
crosses needs to be fully rebuilt
because of its weight, basically
destroying everything that is in its
path. It needs tons of people for
its mobility too, a good 70 men
to prepare the way. Its preferred
transferring
was
through
caterpillar treads rather than
disassemble-and-reassemble
because it is less expensive.
The Bagger 288 replaced NASA’s
Crawler-Transporter in the throne
of the world’s largest land vehicle.
NOVEMBER 2016
Mining Engineering and Its Importance
23