Failure Probability Prediction of Thermally Stable Diamond Composite Tipped Picks in the Cutting Cycle of Underground Roadway Development
The Thermally Stable Diamond Composite (TSDC) tipped pick has been developed to replace Tungsten Carbide (WC) tipped picks for hard rock cutting. Due to the material properties of TSDC, a major failure mode of TSDC tipped picks during rock cutting is random failures caused by excessive bending force acting on the cutting tips. A probabilistic approach has been proposed to estimate the failure probability of picks with this failure mode. However, there are two limitations in existing research: only one drum revolution is considered, and the variation of rock thickness is ignored. This study aims to extend the current approach via removing these limitations, based on the failure probability analysis of picks over a full cutting cycle in the underground coal mining roadway development process. The research results show that both drum advance direction and the variation of rock thickness have significant impacts on pick failure probability. The extended approach can be used to estimate pick failure probability for more realistic scenarios in real applications with improved accuracy. Although the study focused on TSDC tipped picks, the developed approach can also be applied to other types of picks.