The submerged mechanical excavation of rock is required for dredging or miningpurposes and it is usually performed with pick points or cutting teeth. Although the mechanical cutting process is quite well understood on land, in adry situation, questions remain regarding saturated cutting in a shallow watersubmerged application.
Even more unanswered questions remain in a deepsea situation where the processis subjected to the hyperbaric effect, influencing the cutting processstrongly.
Especially for deepsea, the required cutting forces and power will have to bedecreased, in order to realize a technical and economical feasible excavationprocess. Firstly the hyperbaric cutting process must be fully understood andsecondly concepts to decrease the forces and power must be evaluated. Althoughcomputer simulations with Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) have been validatedby experiments and proved to be very helpful in understanding hyperbariccutting, some questions can only be answered by performing physical tests. Therefore IHC Merwede has developed a test set-up.
This test set-up can drive chisels or picks in a linear motion through a blockof rock. During the process, the cutting forces will be measured in all threedirections. Although, linear cutting test set-ups exist in the world, theseset-ups mainly focus on determining the horizontal cutting force. However, especially the vertical forces require attention, because these forces must betransferred by relatively light equipment. We use the test set-up toinvestigate current cutting concepts, and to evaluate new cutting concepts. Inthe future, we will use this setup to evaluate the cutting process as part ofthe design process for specific client driven mining applications: specificrock samples under specific environment conditions (pressure, temperature, water composition etc.).
This paper describes the technical details, capabilities and limitations of thetest set-up.
