Specialists of the Belarusian Automobile Works and Kemerovo’s coal miners have had good cause to exchange congratulations. In the Chernigovsky opencast coal mine, included in the Siberian Business Union Holding Company CJSC, a solemn putting into operation of the first BelAZ-75710 dump truck with a capacity of 450 tonnes has been held. It’s the biggest capacity dump truck in the world, as records in the Record Book of the CIS and Record Book of Europe evidence. Now, the machine will prove in practice that it’s the most economically profitable in the process of surface mining operations.
New vehicle ready to prove itself most economically efficient in open-cut mining
This event has a rich history. It began more than 65 years ago, when the Belarusian Automobile Plant was constructed. Ever since then, hundreds of models and variants of open-cut transport have been produced here, and practically every vehicle has had an ever-higher load capacity and increase of other technical and economical characteristics. So construction of the 450-tonne giant was quite natural here. It was shown to the public less than a year ago and the size of the ‘newborn’ amazed even experts. Its length is more than 20 metres, width — about 10 metres and it has eight, 4-metre tyres. If you climb to the cab of the platform, you can easily jump on the roof of a 3-storey house and in a vertical position, the platform reaches the height of a 6-storey building. Fully loaded, the machine weighs more than 800 tonnes, but moves at speeds of up to 64 kilometres an hour — almost like a passenger car. Certainly, as the specialists of the enterprise say, such a giant must have a strong ‘heart’. There are two diesel engines of common capacity of 4,600HP. Plus four of the strongest electro motors in the hubs of all wheels, two rotary axles, plus a lot of other technical solutions, not having equal in the world. They needed months of testing on the factory floor, followed by dismantling and dispatch to Kuzbass, where the machine was again assembled and tested, and its working biography begun.
It’s a known fact that the Belarusian Automobile Works is ahead of the curve in its work. Mining operations go further in undeveloped areas, bite deeper into the Earth’s interior with their excavators. And it becomes a more competitive business. The winner is the one whose costs of getting of a tonne of mineral resources are lower, and those using the most large-tonnage plants, have the lowest expenses. According to this world trend, BelAZ has recently built on its territory a practically new plant for the production of heavy machines. Everything matches these giants here: the plant has the strongest concrete floor and huge gates. Here, new 450-tonne machines will be produced in the near future.
How many of them will there be? Only time will tell, but such machines are piece-goods; they are made on special order. To use them, a customer must have everything at the relevant level: a huge excavator, durable roads, like in the Chernigovsky opencast coal mine. By the way, BelAZ has long-standing partner relationships with extracting and transport enterprises of the Kemerovo Region. The first Belarusian large dump trucks appeared here in the 1960s. Currently about 2,800 machines with a capacity of 30 to 360 tonnes, and now with a capacity of 450 tonnes, are working here. At the bottom, enterprises of the region have become for BelAZ a testing area, where the most daring engineering plans are examined in conditions of a real environment.
