[bauma 2022] Rock Feel - Sensors for cutter heads

From Saxony, this is RockFeel.
RockFeel is developing sensors for cutter heads which are machines used to cut rock or concrete in mining and in construction especially ground construction, tunneling.

And an imminent problem in this area is wheel of the picks which are used to destroy the rock or the concrete.

And normally these picks would move all the time and rotate in order to have a symmetrical wear and wear around the system and have them stand longer.  

But these picks can get stuck and then the material is destroying actually pick very fast. 

You see this here for a road cutting device with smaller picks.

We do this first, in the first place for mining applications for bigger picks.

And we have found the system which is robust enough to survive under these very hard conditions with very strong impact on the tools.

and can record data about the movement of the picks.

So in the first place it can differentiate between a moving and and still movable pick and the pick getting stuck.

So the operator gets an early warning or can get an early warning, and do something about it before too many things are destroyed.

And so the efficiency of the machine will be heightened and make better.

And another application which actually is the one we started with was selective cutting which is seen on the background here.

Because many mines in the in the world especially in Germany are very small deposits and you cannot exploit them at the moment in an economical way.

because the Machinery or the kind of excavation is not  suitable for that.

So it produces large streams of material which contains various low amounts of minerals and commodities to to get out in the end.  

So we try to and develop systems which can detect which kind of material is actually cut with the picks.

By the reaction of the picks , what is being cut.
And we can differentiate between very hard and very weak material with these picks at the moment and we are doing results in that.

And we think that we are the first on the world to do this kind of pick movement measurement

and we try to improve the the chances of doing mining in a very green and clean and resource-saving method or methodology.

So hopefully our company will get started with the big players in the industry with a machine manufacturers.

They already are very impressed by what we have done here and we will start project with them,

we start development of certain applications in order to have assistance systems which give the operators  early warning in the first place.

but later on also will enable maybe autonomous machines because what we get from this signals are just control signals for the machine.

And actually this is a way towards automated mining in the future.
You may visit very soon our new website www.rockfeel.de/

and where you will find more detailed descriptions of our products and of what we can offer.  

And maybe you just follow us at LinkedIn, you just type RockFeel and you find us.

You will find it just here type RockFeel because we make rock cutting machines feel the rock. Thank you.