This paper deals with the automation of the rock cutting process with roadheaders used widely in civil engineering for drilling roadways in underground mines and tunnels. Although there has been intensive technical development, roadheaders are still manually controlled. Manual control does not allow optimizing the values of the cutting process parameters, which often results in low mining efficiency, especially in the case of hard rocks, as well as high energy consumption and significant dynamic overloading of the roadheader. As part of theoretical and experimental research, an automatic control system was designed for the boom-type roadheader and an algorithm was developed for the optimal control of the cutting process parameters. Control criteria have been formulated, based on which the current values of the cutting process parameters are worked out using the information on the dynamic load state of the roadheader. The paper presents selected results of numerical tests conducted on roadheader dynamics, which simulated the automatic control system operation of the heading face cutting process of drilled roadway or tunnel. These tests were intended to analyze the behavior of the investigated object during simulated rock cutting in automatic mode. The results confirmed the possibility of a significant reduction in mining energy consumption.
Analysis of rock cutting process with a blunt PDC cutter under different wear flat inclination angles