MINING MONSTER
Taller than the Statue of Liberty and heavier
than the Eiffel Tower, called Bagger 288, this
monster mining machine uses its revolving
wheel of buckets as a shovel to continually
shift 8.5-million cubic feet of dirt a day
— and is one of the largest land vehicles
on Earth.
The primary function of bucket-wheel
excavators (BWEs) is to act as a continuous
digging machine in large-scale open-pit mining
operations. What sets BWEs 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
used to scoop material as the wheel turns.
While BWEs and bucket chain excavators
took jobs that were previously accomplished by
rope shovels and draglines, they in turn have
been replaced in most applications by hydraulic
excavators. Nevertheless, BWEs still remain in
use for very large-scale operations, where they
can be used for the transfer of loose materials or
the excavation of soft to semi-hard overburden.
The Bagger 288 (pictured) cost USD100-
million to build, took five years to design and
manufacture, and five years to assemble. When it
was completed, the Bagger 288 overtook NASA’s
Crawler-Transporter, used to move space shuttles
and the Apollo spacecraft, as the world’s largest
land vehicle.
However, the biggest BWE ever built, Bagger 293,
is the largest terrestrial (land) vehicle in history by
weight (14 200 tonnes), according to the Guinness
World Records. ■
BAGGER 288 NUMBERS
4
799
1 707
39 916
22
conveyor belts receive overburden (soil and rock) or lignite from the buckets and carry
the material at more than 17.7km/h. Each belt is 3.3m wide, big enough to ferry a Smart
car with ease.
square metres of tread carry the Bagger’s 11 607 (imperial) tons of weight at a
stately 0.6km/h.
metres of electrical cables (each the diameter of a man’s arm) feed electricity to the
excavator. In any given moment, it can use as much juice as a city of 20 000 people can.
kilograms of paint cover the structure, which includes two pylons— each 45m tall — and
2 200m of steel suspension cables.
metres tall, the bucket-wheel is the height of a seven-storey building. Each of its 18
buckets is 3 492kg (empty!) and can scoop 6.5m 3 of soil, enough to fill a cargo van.
Source: Popular Science
OCTOBER 2018
21