Professional Articles

Truck & Rail Transport

Robotic Wagon Vibrator Discharges Sticky Coal

Many high capacity coal export terminals, which receive coal by rail in bottom-dump wagons, experience major delays due to discharge failure when handling sticky coal. These delays can have a serious adverse impact on the capacity of the rail system feeding the port and on the throughput capacity of terminal inloading. The associated costs to the terminal through lost production can be substantial.
At Australian ports, the technique used to address sticky coal discharge problems has historically been to use manually operated jack hammers, applied to the sides of the wagon. While moderately effective, delays with sticky coal can still be very long. Furthermore, the use of jack hammers is physically demanding for operators, and represents a significant health and safety risk, performing an ergonomically difficult task in a very noisy, often harsh environment.
To solve this problem, BMT WBM has developed a fully automatic robotic wagon vibrator. A number of these wagon vibrators are now operating in several Queensland coal terminals.