Subterranean Vehicles
| Civilian | ||||||
| Type | Size (metres) | HPs | AC | A/DF | MR | Speed |
| Bulldozer | 12 | 800 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 30 |
| Continuous Miner | 17 | 650 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 70 |
| Continuous Miner, Giant | 130 | 2000 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 60 |
| Excavator, Bucket | 225 | 4000 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 30 |
| Hauler | 4 | 700 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 70 |
| Hauler, Giant | 15 | 2000 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 65 |
| Hydraulic Shovel | 11 | 900 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 30 |
| Load Haul Dump Machine | 6 | 750 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 50 |
| Personnel Carrier | 6 | 400 | 4 | 2 | 2 | 60 |
| Scaler | 7 | 550 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 30 |
| Scooptram | 6 | 700 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 45 |
| Shtocreter | 6 | 800 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 30 |
| Shuttle Car | 8 | 450 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 35 |
| Transmixer | 7 | 600 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 70 |
| Tunnel Boring Machine | 18 | 900 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 20 |
| Underground Rocket | 3 | 300 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 30 |
| Wheel Loader | 12 | 800 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 45 |
| Military | ||||||
| Type | Size (metres) | HPs | AC | A/DF | MR | Speed |
| Nuclear Subterrene | 85 | 1000 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 30 |
| Segmented Burrower | 150 | 4000 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 45 |
| Bulldozer: A bulldozer is a crawler (continuous tracked tractor) equipped with a substantial metal plate (known as a blade) used to push large quantities of soil, sand, rubble, or other such material during construction or conversion work and typically equipped at the rear with a claw-like device (known as a ripper) to loosen densely compacted materials. Bulldozers can be found on a wide range of sites, mines and quarries, military bases, heavy industry factories, engineering projects and farms. The term "bulldozer" correctly refers only to a tractor (usually tracked) fitted with a dozer blade. | ||||||
| Continuous Miner: A machine with a large rotating steel drum equipped with tungsten carbide teeth that scrape coal from the seam. Operating in a “room and pillar” system – where the mine is divided into a series of 6-to-9 metre “rooms” or work areas cut into the coal bed – it can mine as much as five tons of coal a minute – more than a miner of the 1920s would produce in an entire day. | ||||||
| Excavator: The largest bucket excavators measure 96 metres in height. Coming in at 225 meters long is weighs 14 200 tonnes and requires five people to operate it. The Bucket wheel itself is more than 21 metres in diameter and has 20 buckets, which can hold more than 15 cubic metres each. The machine is capable of chewing through 240 000 cubic metres of dirt in a single day. | ||||||
| Hauler: Off-road dump trucks are used strictly off-road for mining and heavy dirt hauling jobs. There are two primary forms: rigid frame and articulating frame. The term ‘dump’ truck is not generally used by the mining industry, or by the manufacturers that build these machines. The more appropriate term for this strictly off road vehicle is “haul truck” and the equivalent European term is ‘dumper’. | ||||||
| Hydraulic Shovel: The largest machine weighs in at 980 tonnes with a max power of 3360kW and a bucket capacity of 50 cubic metres. It also made an appearance in the second transformers film, as the Decepticon Demolisher. | ||||||
| Load Haul Dump Machine: LHD loaders are similar to conventional front end loaders but developed for the toughest of hard rock mining applications, with overall production economy, safety and reliability in mind. They are extremely rugged, highly manoeuvrable and exceptionally productive. LHD have powerful prime movers, advanced drive train technology, heavy planetary axles, four-wheel drive, articulated steering and ergonomic controls. Their narrower, longer and lower profile make them most suitable for underground application where height and width is limited. As the length is not a limitation in underground tunnel and decline LHD are designed with sufficient length. The length improves axial weight distribution and bucket capacity can be enhanced. The two-part construction with central articulation helps in tracking and manoeuvrability. In mining there is limitation for shifting heavy equipment. Sometimes, an LHD has to be shifted through a shaft while dismantled. Their tramming capacities varies from 1 to 17-25 metric tons. Their bucket size varies from 0.8 to 10 m3. Bucket height range from 1.8 to 2.5 m. LHDs are available with remote controls. These are essential to remove the material where the stope is unprotected from top. There can be fall of loose muck from top. There are LHD available with remote tramming facility and these can handle 8000 tons of ore per day. | ||||||
| Nuclear Subterrene: The 1950s and 1960s saw a variety of proposals for applying nuclear energy. Among these was the subterrene, a tunneling machine that would use a nuclear reaction to heat molten lithium and use it to melt rock. A layer of cooling lithium would flow back between the vehicle’s sides and the vitrifying rock walls, to be recirculated into the reactor. Tunneling speed would be unchanged in clay, soil, or sand. The use of a nuclear reactor would limit the minimum size of the craft. Fictional subterrenes are often depicted as cylindrical in shape with conical drill heads at one or both ends, sometimes with some kind of tank-tread for propulsion, and described either as leaving an empty tunnel behind it, or as filling the space behind it with mining debris. A real-world, mobile subterrene must work thermally, using very high temperature and immense pressure to melt and push through rock. The front of the machine is equipped with a stationary drill tip which is kept at 700–930 °C. The molten rock is pushed around the edges as the vehicle is forced forward, and cools to a glass-like lining of the tunnel. Massive amounts of energy are required to heat the drill head, supplied via nuclear power or electricity. | ||||||
| Personnel Carrier: Personnel vehicles are used to transport miners and equipment from the surface of the mine to the underground working locations. | ||||||
| Scaler: Scaling is a key part in the mining cycle. Scaling is the taking down of loose material from the roof, face and rib in hard rock mining. | ||||||
| Scooptram: A rubber tired, battery or diesel-operated piece of equipment designed for cleaning runways and hauling supplies. | ||||||
| Segmented Burrower: This
tunneller's design is based on the body structure of a
segmented worm, which is evolutionarily adapted to tunneling in firm soil. It can tunnel through sand or ordinary soil, and has
enough internal space for 50 tanks and basic medical
and intelligence support for them. It may also carry small combat or spy robots, mines, or heavy weapons. The “big worm” burrows by expanding its middle segments to their maximum diameter to anchor them in place, and contracting and elongating its forward segments to thrust them through soil, after which it expands them, pulling forward the segments behind them, in a series of peristaltic waves. This creates a tunnel 2 metres in diameter. A double-ended design allows it to reverse direction and retreat if necessary. The craft is 50% heavier than water and cannot float, but is sealed and can move through water-saturated soil. It can burrow through 14,500 cubic feet/hour. |
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| Shtocreter: Shotcreter is a mechanized shotcrete spraying system developed specifically for underground ground support applications. Shotcrete is concrete (or sometimes mortar) conveyed through a hose and pneumatically projected at high velocity onto a surface, as a construction technique. Shotcrete undergoes placement and compaction at the same time due to the force with which it is projected from the nozzle. It can be impacted onto any type or shape of surface, including vertical or overhead areas. | ||||||
| Shuttle Car: In room-and-pillar systems, electric-powered, rubber-tired vehicles called shuttle cars haul coal from the face to the intermediate haulage system. | ||||||
| Transmixer: The transmixer sprays concrete in underground mines. | ||||||
| Tunnel-Boring Machine:
A tunnel boring machine (TBM), also known as a "mole", is a machine used to
excavate tunnels with a circular cross section through a variety of soil and
rock strata. They may also be used for microtunneling. They can bore through
anything from hard rock to sand. Tunnel diameters can range from a metre (done
with micro-TBMs) to 19.25 metres to date. Tunnels of less than a metre or so in
diameter are typically done using trenchless construction methods or horizontal
directional drilling rather than TBMs.
Tunnel boring machines are used as an alternative to drilling and blasting (D&B)
methods in rock and conventional "hand mining" in soil. TBMs have the advantages
of limiting the disturbance to the surrounding ground and producing a smooth
tunnel wall. This significantly reduces the cost of lining the tunnel, and makes
them suitable to use in heavily urbanized areas. The major disadvantage is the
upfront cost. TBMs are expensive to construct, and can be difficult to
transport. The longer the tunnel, the less the relative cost of tunnel boring
machines versus drill and blast methods. This is because tunneling with TBMs is
much more efficient and results in shortened completion times, assuming they
operate successfully.
In hard rock, either shielded or open-type TBMs can be used. All types of hard
rock TBMs excavate rock using disc cutters mounted in the cutter head. The disc
cutters create compressive stress fractures in the rock, causing it to chip away
from the rock in front of the machine, called the tunnel face. The excavated
rock, known as muck, is transferred through openings in the cutter head to a
belt conveyor, where it runs through the machine to a system of conveyors or
muck cars for removal from the tunnel. Open-type TBMs have no shield, leaving the area behind the cutter head open for rock support. To advance, the machine uses a gripper system that pushes against the side walls of the tunnel. Not all machines can be continuously steered while gripper shoes push on the side-walls, as in the case of a Wirth machine which will only steer while ungripped. The machine will then push forward off the grippers gaining thrust. At the end of a stroke, the rear legs of the machine are lowered, the grippers and propel cylinders are retracted. The retraction of the propel cylinders repositions the gripper assembly for the next boring cycle. The grippers are extended, the rear legs lifted, and boring begins again. The open-type, or Main Beam, TBM does not install concrete segments behind it as other machines do. Instead, the rock is held up using ground support methods such as ring beams, rock bolts, shotcrete, steel straps, ring steel and wire mesh. In fractured rock, shielded hard rock TBMs can be used, which erect concrete segments to support unstable tunnel walls behind the machine. Double Shield TBMs have two modes; in stable ground they can grip against the tunnel walls to advance. In unstable, fractured ground, the thrust is shifted to thrust cylinders that push off against the tunnel segments behind the machine. This keeps the significant thrust forces from impacting fragile tunnel walls. Single Shield TBMs operate in the same way, but are used only in fractured ground, as they can only push off against the concrete segments. In soft ground, there are three main types of TBMs: Earth Pressure Balance
Machines (EPB), Slurry Shield (SS) and open-face type. Both types of closed
machines operate like Single Shield TBMs, using thrust cylinders to advance
forward by pushing off against concrete segments. Earth Pressure Balance
Machines are used in soft ground with less than 7 bar of pressure. The cutter
head does not use disc cutters only, but instead a combination of tungsten
carbide cutting bits, carbide disc cutters, drag picks and/or hard rock disc
cutters. The EPB gets its name because it is uses the excavated material to
balance the pressure at the tunnel face. Pressure is maintained in the
cutterhead by controlling the rate of extraction of spoil through the Archimedes
screw and the advance rate. Additives such as bentonite, polymers and foam can
be injected ahead of the face to increase the stability of the ground. Additives
can also be injected in the cutterhead/extraction screw to ensure that the spoil
remains sufficiently cohesive to form a plug in the Archimedes screw to maintain
pressure in the cutterhead and restrict water flowing through.
In soft ground with very high water pressure or where ground conditions are
granular (sands and gravels) so much so that a plug could not be formed in the
Archimedes screw, Slurry Shield TBMs are needed. The cutterhead is filled with
pressurised slurry which applies hydrostatic pressure to the excavation face.
The slurry also acts as a transport medium by mixing with the excavated material
before being pumped out of the cutterhead back to a slurry separation plant,
usually outside of the tunnel. Slurry separation plants are a multi-stage
filtration systems, which remove particles of spoil from the slurry so that it
may be reused in the construction process. The limit to which slurry can be
'cleaned' depends on the particle size of the excavated material. For this
reason, slurry TBMs are not suitable for silts and clays as the particle sizes
of the spoil are less than that of the bentonite clay from which the slurry is
made. In this case, the slurry is separated into water, which can be recycled
and a clay cake, which is pressed from the water. |
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| Underground Rocket: An underground rocket or rocket drill is a device for rapidly drilling holes through soil and rock of varying composition at rates up to 1 metre per second by utilising supersonic jets of hot gases. Proposed uses for the device included drilling shallow holes for mineral exploration, construction, underground gasification of coal, water and methane drainage. The initial design called for an autonomous device equipped with a drill head that would be rotated by expanding gases generated by a propellant burning inside a combustion chamber, in a manner similar to a Segner wheel. As the hot gases escaped the slits in the drill head at high speeds, they would break down the ground in front of the device. Experiments have shown the device could achieve drilling speed of 5 metres per minute through solid rock and up to 100 metres per minute in soil. The solid fuel version of the device was limited by the volume of propellant it could carry, which was sufficient for 5 to 20 seconds of operation, enough to create a well up to 20 metres deep. The inventor saw further progress in moving on to liquid fuel rockets, expecting their operational time to be measured in tens of minutes, with potential to be eventually increased to a few hours. | ||||||
| Wheel Loader: The loader has an operational weight of 234 tonnes, and 1715 kW of power, and is able to carry a 65 tonne payload in its 40.52 cubic metre bucket. | ||||||