Pick Wear Monitoring

Steel against Rock. A material battle. Time for Automatic Monitoring!

Cutting excavation is a material battle!

Wear is the main cost factor in rock oder concrete cutting excavation. Both rock properties and proper tool selection as well as actual operation have significant influence on mode as well as progress of tool wear. Nowadays, no method is in practical application in order to monitor pick wear with sensors.

Machine operation ist instead stopped on a regular basis, and visually inspected by the operator, in order to assess wear state and possibly operational reserve of the picks . This requires experienced personel and can still not foresee rapid or fatal wear – caused by common steep changes in material properties going unnoticed under noisy operations, causing high or asymmetric wear or even havoc with pick break and damage to pick holders or drum.

RockFeel is taking aim on pick wear

By contactless Detektion of pick measures and forms the operator is able to assess wear state of alle picks on the entire drum at any time from his safe place at the steering bridge of the machine or at his remote control unit as soon as the cutting drum is going into idle mode, quasi in running operation. Personal inspection at the dangerous plcae near the cuttting face or under the machine will be reduced to the case of actual pick change. Even unexperienced operators get a warning at the control panel, if a single pick turns to a critical wear state – just in time, but not before. So each pick can be used with optimum operating time. In the long term, this will enable remote pick wear control of severeal autonomous machines at an operators desk .

  • automatic Detection of several symmetric wear states
    – Display and Warning at ritical threshold e.g. 30%
  • automatic Detektion of asymmetric wear – Warning of pick blockage
  • automatic Detection of pick break – emergency stop possible in order to avoid holder damage
  • automatic Detection of new Picks – Resetting wear state to 0%
  • for each pick on the drum
  • in running cutting operation or idle mode, depending on machine type
  • optimized planning of pick changes
  • Accumulation of wear data for internal performance assessment and optimization
  • also suitable as a learning program for proper, wear-optimized cutting at a local site

We develop a platform soultion for all machines with rotating picks or chisels on rotating drums – from cutterheads to road headers, from Continuous Miners to shaft or tunnel boring road headers. Even an applicaton in certain Rock crushers Anwendung can be imagined. This system can be adapted to your machine type, too. In the single case for a building site or a mineworlks, but also as a serial Add-On, built-in and maintained by the OEM. Our Design is robust, even under mining conditions, but ot unbreakable – that’s why we take care of easy replacement design for all exposed parts at the protective means. Denn machen wir uns nichts vor – Staub, aggressive Wässer Vibrationen und Schläge, dazu ggf. der Einsatz unter freiem Himmel in allen Klimazonen oder untertage – das verlangt jeder Technik alles ab.

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