The Operation of Bucket Wheel Excavators When Encountering Inclusions with Excessive Mining Resistance

The Bucket Wheel Excavator (BWE) is the main piece of harvesting equipment used in open-pit lig-nite or brown coal open-pit mines worldwide. Despite the continuous increase in size, productivity and technical sophistication in recent decades, they have not adapted to the changes of operating environ-ment. In this respect, the increasingly frequent occurrence of hard inclusions – in terms of layers, boulders and other forms – has revealed a consistent failure of BWE-s to meet this challenge. This paper, inspired by the research project RFCR-CT-2015-00003-BEWEXMIN „Bucket wheel excava-tors operating under difficult mining conditions including un-mineable inclusions and geological struc-tures with excessive mining resistance” deals with preliminary considerations and results that aim to contribute to solving this problem