Mining Engineering Commons^™

Dragline Excavation Simulation, Real-Time Terrain Recognition And Object Detection, Godfred Somua-Gyimah

Doctoral Dissertations

"The contribution of coal to global energy is expected to remain above 30% through 2030. Draglines are the preferred excavation equipment in most surface coal mines. Recently, studies toward dragline excavation efficiency have focused on two specific areas. The first area is dragline bucket studies, where the goal is to develop new designs which perform better than conventional buckets. Drawbacks in the current approach include operator inconsistencies and the inability to physically test every proposed design. Previous simulation models used Distinct Element Methods (DEM) but they over-predict excavation forces by 300% to 500%. In this study, a DEM-based simulation model …