Krupp Bagger 288 - One Of The Worlds Largest Construction

KRUPP BAGGER 288

Bagger 288 (Excavator 288), engineered by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile mining machine.
When its construction was completed in 1978, Bagger 288 superseded NASA's Crawler-Transporter, used to carry the space vehicle and apollo Saturn V launch vehicle (itself engineered by excavator manufacturer Marion shovel Company), because the largest land vehicle within the world, at 13,500 tons.

The Bagger 288 was engineered for the duty of removing overburden before coal mining at the Hambach stripmine in germany. It will excavate 240,000 a lot of coal or 240,000 cube-shaped metres of overburden daily– the equivalent of a playing field (soccer) dug to 30 m (98 ft) deep. The coal created in in some unspecified time in the future fills 2400 coal wagons. The excavator is up to 220 m (721 ft) long and some 96 m (315 ft) high.
It will travel a pair of to ten m (6.6 to 32.8 ft) per minute (0.1 to 0.6 km/h). The chassis of the most section is 46 m (151 ft) wide and sits on three rows of four belt assemblies, each 3.8 m (12 ft) wide. the massive area of the tracks means that the bottom pressure of the Bagger 288 is very little (17.1 N/cm2 or twenty four.8 psi); this enables the excavator to travel over gravel, earth and even grass while not effort a major track. it's a minimum turning radius of roughly 100 metres, and might climb a most gradient of 1:18.

• The excavating head itself is twenty 1.6 m in diameter and has eighteen buckets every holding 6.6 cube-shaped metres (8.6 yd³) of overburden.

By February 2001, the excavator had fully exposed the coal supply at the Tagebau Hambach mine and was now not required there. In 3 weeks it created a 22-kilometre (14 mi) trip to the Tagebau Garzweiler, traveling across autobahn 61, the stream Erft, a railroad, and a number of other roads


The move price nearly 15 million German marks and needed a team of seventy employees. Rivers were crossed by inserting giant steel pipes for the water to flow through and providing a swish surface over the pipes with rocks and gravel. Special grass was seeded to swish its passage over valuable parcel. Moving Bagger 288 in one piece was a lot of economical than disassembling the excavator and moving it piece by piece.