South Africa's deep-level gold mining—at depths exceeding 3,500 meters in the Witwatersrand Basin—operates under some of the most demanding occupational safety regulations for mining equipment globally. The Mines Health and Safety Act and...
VIEW MORE
The return-wave damping system in the Atlas Copco RD18U absorbs the tensile stress wave that reflects back from the rock face after each percussion blow. Without it, that wave travels up the drill string to the shank adapter and into the drifter hous...
VIEW MORE
Saudi Arabia's phosphate mining at Ma'aden's Wa'ad Al Shamal complex and the gold mining operations in the Arabian Shield operate in one of the world's most thermally demanding surface environments: ambient temperatures reaching 48°C in summer mo...
VIEW MORE
Thailand's mining sector—potash in Udon Thani, zinc at Mae Sot, fluorite and limestone quarrying across the central highlands—operates RD18U drifters across a range of formation types and drilling orientations. The connecting plate is the...
VIEW MORE
Vale's Carajás complex in northern Pará state presents a drill bearing with a problem that doesn't appear on the surface and isn't obvious until bearing failures start clustering at a specific drilling depth. The Carajás ore body...
VIEW MORE
Chile's copper mining industry—Codelco's Chuquicamata and El Teniente, Antofagasta's Los Pelambres, BHP's Escondida—represents the world's largest concentration of copper extraction, and a correspondingly large installed base of Atlas Cop...
VIEW MORE
Peru's mining sector—centered on copper at Antamina and Cerro Verde, silver and zinc at Antapaccay, and gold across the Andes cordillera—drills through some of the hemisphere's hardest and most abrasive formations. Quartzite, skarn, and p...
VIEW MORE
Malaysia's underground mining and civil tunneling programs—most recently including infrastructure tunneling under Kuala Lumpur's urban core and hard-rock quarrying in Perak's limestone and granite highlands—operate in near-constant high h...
VIEW MORE
Indonesia's nickel laterite belt—from Halmahera to Sulawesi—has driven one of the world's fastest-growing mining investment programs in the past decade, and with it a large installed base of Atlas Copco RD18U drifters in underground explo...
VIEW MORE
Australian hard-rock operations—from Goldfields-Agnico's Fosterville gold mine in Victoria to Evolution Mining's Cowal open-pit and the copper operations around Mount Isa—share a climatic condition that most European equipment documentati...
VIEW MORE
Canadian hard-rock mining from the Timmins gold camp in Ontario to the Sudbury nickel basin and the potash mines of Saskatchewan spans a wider range of operating temperatures than most equipment is explicitly designed for. A drifter diaphragm specifi...
VIEW MORE
Poland's hard coal and copper mining operations—KGHM Polska Miedź in the Lubin-Sieroszowice copper district and JSW's coking coal mines in Silesia—run some of the highest-utilization drill fleets in European underground mining. Two-shift ...
VIEW MORE