Mechanical Technology February 2015

⎪ Innovative engineering ⎪

high temperature applications. Describing an early materials handling success, he cites a hopper and transfer car positioning solution at a lignite coal mine near Aachen. In this application, the loading unit and the transfer car were automated to follow the bucket wheel excavator along the length of the bench conveyor. The loading unit runs on tracks and travels above the bench con- veyor with about 0.1 m of side tolerance and within 0.5° of heading tolerance. Additionally, the transfer conveyor head has to be over the loading unit to within 0.2 m of lateral and 0.5 m of longitudinal tolerance to avoid spillage. The indurad solution allows the machine to operate well within these limits, which were originally set by the customer. “This was previously achieved by op- erators using joysticks to constantly keep the units aligned, but it is unreasonable to expect operators to perform this task accurately for a full eight hour shift,” Winkel suggests. “In this application, the bucket wheel excavator cuts along a 5,0 km bench and the transfer car automatically follows the cutter, keeping its transfer chute aligned to the bench conveyor,” he explains. “The radar sys- tem accurately controls the speed of the transfer car and its alignment angle and height relative to the conveyor,” he adds. Another early success was the installation of a radar solution with ThyssenKrupp on one of its a fully mo- bile crushing systems in China. “With crushers, it is important to know the quantity of material along the full length of the feeder, to be sure that the crusher will never be empty. If large rocks are dumped directly onto the crushing feeder

motorcars. Typically, these come with an accuracy of around one metre over a 75 to 80 m range. The accuracy of our stan- dard sensors lies in the 5.0 cm range and we have one sensor with an accuracy of under10 µ m. In addition to that, we are the first company to offer 2D industrial radar monitoring and control solutions, a capability that enables operator support ranging from predictive collision avoid- ance all the way to machine automation,” Winkel informs MechTech . The company has also installed a 3D radar system in a blast furnace in Austria, which demon- strates the usability of indurad sensors for

thousand of Euros, and the 1D level- sensing systems costing thousands of Euros. Following the successful instal- lation of this radar technology on an Eickhoff shearer loader in a coalmine, indurad was established and registered in 2008 to take this technology to industrial markets. “The key differentiators for our sys- tems are high resolution and robustness,” claims Winkel. “To accurately and auto- matically position a travelling hopper car above a conveyor, a positioning accuracy better than 10 cm is needed, which rules out any of the sensors available for use in

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