Dragline performance study in indian coal mines

Abstract

Draglines have been abundantly used in coal mining for decades, either as stripper or stripper and coal extractor. Since this equipment has certain inborn advantages, which their challengers do not, they must be operated in a 24-hour day and night manner for high productivity and low costs. In India, the development of giant surface mining ventures like Bina and Jayant removes large volume of overburden in shortest possible time to achieve higher coal production targets (upto 10 million tonnes per annum). This has led to major changes in overburden/ interburden excavation technology in surface coal mines from shovel mining to that of draglines. Coal India Limited (CIL) has now standardized the draglines in two sizes, which are 10/70 and 24/96 for their mines. Most of the mines depend 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on the dragline working. In many coal mines, the mine's output is totally dependent on the dragline’s performance since it is the only primary stripping tool. For these reasons, design of draglines require importance placed on developing component’s with high levels of reliability and predictability so that repairs and replacement of components can be scheduled at times that will least affect the overall mining operation. Before deploying draglines in mines, various factors have to be considered for selection of suitable size of the dragline and other parameters. Different parameters are used to determine the production and productivity of draglines. Also availability and utilization of different draglines have been calculated and their performance was studied and various reasons of decreasing performance are pointed out. In this thesis these points are discussed in detail.