Bucket Chain Dredge Productivity Estimation in Manmade Placer Mining: Methodological Framework

The article gives methodical guidelines for calculating hourly and daily outputs of bucket chain dredges. The improved output determination procedure is a chain of calculations of dredge performance in correlation with strength characteristics of rocks and with their depth- and width-varied properties. It is proposed to group the mining time and to take into account the action time losses connected with face cutting, dredging within the placer limits, and with breaks for the auxiliary operations. The delays are included via the introduced face cutting factor. It is found how the technical capacity of dredge, the face cutting factor and the dredge utilization per day change as function of the face width at different thickness of placers. The authors put forward an empirical equation for the technical dredge capacity.