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Giant Machines
Bucket Wheel Excavators
45:06 The bucket wheel excavator, the largest machine that moves on land. Filmed and published by Banijay Science. Plays from YouTube, nothing here is re-hosted.
What it does
A bucket wheel excavator digs continuously rather than in cycles. Where a shovel fills a bucket, swings, dumps and swings back, a bucket wheel keeps a wheel of buckets turning against the face and pours a permanent river of material onto a conveyor. It is the highest volume digging method ever devised.
How it works
A wheel carrying a ring of buckets rotates at the end of a long boom. As the wheel turns, each bucket cuts a slice from the face, carries it up and over the top, and dumps it into a chute as it inverts. The chute feeds a conveyor that runs the length of the boom, across the machine body and out over a discharge boom to a bench conveyor or a spreader. The whole machine slews to sweep the face and then crawls forward on multiple crawler sets to take the next cut. Power comes in through a trailing cable rather than an engine, because no diesel plant of a sensible size could feed it.
The numbers
The Bagger 293, built by TAKRAF and in service since 1995, weighs about 14,200 tons, is 225 meters long, stands 96 meters tall and draws 16.56 megawatts of external electricity. Its bucket wheel is 21 meters in diameter with 18 buckets, each holding around 15 cubic meters. Rated output is roughly 240,000 cubic meters of material a day. It is regularly described as the largest land vehicle ever built, and the description holds up.
Who uses one
Open cast lignite and coal mines, large phosphate and oil sands operations, and stockyard reclaiming at ports and power stations, where a smaller version of the same idea recovers coal or ore from a stockpile at a controlled rate.
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Looking for one of these?
APE does not trade bucket wheel excavators. We do buy and sell the equipment that feeds and follows them: conveyors, crushers, screens, stackers, pumps, generators and plant workshop machinery. Send us your requirement.
American Plant & Equipment has been buying and selling industrial machinery out of Roebuck, South Carolina since 1975, with 97,000 machines in inventory. Tell us the process you need to run and we will go and find the machine, or we will move the one you are finished with.
Prefer to talk? Call (864) 574-0404 or email sales@americanplantandequipment.com.