China’s HATL is a JV between mining services company Hongda Blasting and battery & electrification giant CATL, which was formed in 2020. HATL produces its own battery electric surface and underground mining equipment; as well as retrofitting existing equipment to battery operation.
Recently, HATL produced its first 20 t new generation underground electric mining truck, the UK-20E. The UK-20E vehicle adopts an articulated frame structure, which divides the frame assembly into front frame and rear frame.
The front rack is equipped with simple and fast switching battery modules, which HATL says demonstrate excellent passability and unique recognition. HATL: “In improving the appearance recognition of underground vehicles, the unique structural design makes the vehicle easy to identify in complex underground environments, further enhancing the practicality and safety of the vehicle.”
The high-power, high-torque traction motor direct-drive technology is used to effectively solve the core problems of traditional mechanical transmission system, such as high efficiency, high maintenance costs, response lag and low energy efficiency. The transmission efficiency increased from 85% to over 95%. Removing components such as transmissions has reduced maintenance costs and improved equipment availability.
Eliminating complex transmissions, the powertrain has reduced space by more than 30%. The truck uses electric braking and mechanical braking The electric brake equipment can realise energy recovery and at the same time reduces the use of mechanical brake equipment and so prolongs the service life. The hydraulic oil temperature increase rate is significantly reduced, and the oil temperature cooling requirement of the hydraulic system is reduced, so further energy saving is achieved.
The cab is FOPS/ROPS certified and equipped with air conditioning, providing a friendly working environment for drivers. The interactive full LCD instrument can provide a Chinese/English/other Western languages multi-language interface.
A standard wire control interface is used, upgrading to a full wire control system only requires the addition of hardware to meet the requirements of intelligent unmanned driving of vehicles. The truck is also equipped with Guangxi Jushi’s vehicle remote data monitoring and fault diagnostic system, it can realise the real-time collection and intelligent analysis of the vehicle’s full life cycle data. Equipped with a 360 ° viewing camera, the driver can monitor the complex environment underground without a corner.
In surface mining BEV retrofits, cooperation continues between HATL and Hualian Zinc & Indium – a second batch of HAT-R100E electric remanufactured mining trucks was recently delivered, which are conversions of Terex TR100 rigid trucks.
HATL says the conversions achieve pure electric transformation “through the replacement of power system, optimisation of energy efficiency design, to achieve zero emissions, low noise, high energy efficiency operation, compared with the traditional fuel equipment having an energy saving rate of more than 70%, greatly reducing the carbon emissions of mining operations.”