After a two-month journey by ship, truck and train, the Terex SHM highwall miner will arrive in the newly developed Elegest coal field in the Tuva Republic where it will mine high quality coking coal.
The Tuva Republic is located in Southern Siberian Russia on the Mongolian border.
In March, a group of Russian coal operators and maintenance engineers will undergo training at Terex SHM's headquarters in Beckley, West Virginia.
Now in its second generation, Terex SHM's highwall miner is a self-contained, remotely operated coal mining system. A three- or four-man team can operate and maintain the highwall miner from the surface, with no crew member ever having to go underground.
Depending on the height of the coal seam being recovered, each highwall miner can produce an average of 40,000-120,000 short tons of coal per month, extracting up to 70% of in-situ coal.
The Terex SHM base-frame vehicle is carried on four hydraulically powered crawler units that give 360-degree mobility and allow the machine to be positioned in front of each entry.
Interchangeable electric cutterhead modules mine coal-seam heights ranging from 28in to 15ft.
The sumping force is transmitted to the cutterhead by means of 20ft-long fully enclosed pushbeams. As the cutterhead pushes into the seam, the cut coal is carried by a pair of 18in-diameter conveying augers that run inside the pushbeams.
According to Terex SHM, this design provides a major advantage to this mining system because any rock that falls from the entry roof lands on top of the pushbeam and cannot contaminate the coal being transported inside it.
Once the cut coal has arrived back at the base frame, it is discharged either directly into waiting haulers or to a stockpile for subsequent loading out.
All of the service connections from the base frame to the cutterhead, including the electrical power, control, water, hydraulic lines and methane sensors, are contained within an armoured cable that is automatically unwound from a large-diameter drum on the base frame as each pushbeam is added.
Resting in a groove in the top of the pushbeam, the cables and hoses are completely protected from falling roof rock, and are rewound onto the drum once an entry has been mined out and the cutterhead is being recovered.
