The Industrial Solutions business area of thyssenkrupp will be presenting a new generation of compact bucket wheel excavators at Buma 2016: The Barracuda and the Mine Shark. Both machines will be able to work in hard materials with compressive strengths up to 50 MPa.

While bucket wheel excavators today mostly work in soft and medium-hard rock with an uniaxial compressive strength of up to 20 MPa, the newly designed type of equipment is capable of working in a broad range of materials including coal, limestone, phosphate rock, and potash.

In order to fulfil the requirements of the severe working conditions, special bucket and tooth designs have been applied, based on innovative testing methods and include a larger number of teeth and buckets. This stage of development of bucket wheel excavators demonstrates the changing character of the extraction process from digging to cutting.

The combined extracting and loading process within a single machine eliminates hazardous and ecologically harmful blasting as well as additional loading activities. That is why health and safety standards at the highest level can be ensured. Since the new bucket wheel excavators are able to produce throughputs of over 3,000 t/h, and less vehicles and manpower are required, so operational expenditures can be reduced significantly.