Determination of the Bucket Wheel Drive Power by Computer Modeling Based on Specific Energy Consumption and Cutting Geometry

Starting from the general principles of material cutting, with applicability to coal and overburden excavation using bucket wheel excavators (BWEs), this paper proposes another method for calculating the drive power of the bucket wheel excavator by computer modeling. This approach required two steps. In the first step, the volume of the excavated material for one slewing movement of the boom and for a particular excavation geometry was determined, and the slewing time in the open pit coal mine was measured. In the second one, the values of the specific energy (SE) consumption for cutting were determined by laboratory tests on samples of material taken from the open pit mine. The proposed method allows for the estimation of the load of the bucket wheel drive motor by taking into account only the specific energy necessary for the cutting of the material, the excavated volume during one slewing, and the time required to excavate this volume, and not the wear coefficients of the teeth or bucket edge. This method is important for establishing the correlation between the height of the excavated slice and the slewing speed of the boom in order to optimize the drive power of the bucket wheel and thus improve energy efficiency, increase the performance of excavators, and reduce operating costs