Excavators are heavy construction equipment consisting of a boom, dipper, bucket and cab on a rotating platform known as the "house". The house sits atop an undercarriage with tracks or wheels. They are a natural progression from the steam shovels and often mistakenly called power shovels, as power shovels may have similar looking buckets. All movement and functions of a hydraulic excavator are accomplished through the use of hydraulic fluid, with hydraulic cylinders and hydraulic motors. Due to the linear actuation of hydraulic cylinders, their mode of operation is fundamentally different from cable-operated excavators which use winches and steel ropes to accomplish the movements.
Heavy equipment, heavy machinery, earthmovers, construction vehicles, or construction equipment, refers to heavy-duty vehicles specially designed to execute construction tasks, most frequently involving earthwork operations or other large construction tasks. Heavy equipment usually comprises five equipment systems: the implement, traction, structure, power train, and control/information.
A dragline excavator is a piece of heavy equipment used in civil engineering and surface mining.
The Lausitzring is a race track located near Klettwitz in the state of Brandenburg in northeast Germany, near the borders of Poland and the Czech Republic. It was originally named Lausitzring as it is located in the region of Lusatia, known as Lausitz in German, but was renamed EuroSpeedway Lausitz for better international communication from 2000 to 2010. The EuroSpeedway has been in use for motor racing since 2000. Among other series, DTM takes place there annually. It also used to host the Superbike World Championship.
Bagger 288, built by the German company Krupp for the energy and mining firm Rheinbraun, is a bucket-wheel excavator or mobile strip mining machine.
A bucket-wheel excavator (BWE) is a large heavy equipment machine used in surface mining.
Big Muskie was a coal mining Bucyrus-Erie dragline excavator owned by the Central Ohio Coal Company, weighing 13,500 short tons (12,200 t) and standing nearly 22 stories tall. It operated in the U.S. state of Ohio from 1969 to 1991.
A landship is a large vehicle that travels exclusively on land. Its name is meant to distinguish it from vehicles that travel through other mediums such as conventional ships, airships, and spaceships.
The Berzdorfer See or Lake Berzdorf is located at the southern city limits of Görlitz in Upper Lusatia. It consists of the residual hole of the former Berzdorf open-cast lignite mine, which was flooded from 2002 to the beginning of 2013. The lake forms the southeastern corner of the Lusatian Lake District. With its volume of about 330 million cubic meters and a water depth of max. 72 meters on an area of 960 hectares, it is one of the largest lakes in Saxony. Its name derives from the small village Berzdorf, which was devastated in 1969/70.
TAKRAF Group (“TAKRAF”), is a global German industrial company. Through its brands, TAKRAF and DELKOR, the Group provides equipment, systems and services to the mining and associated industries.
Schipkau is a municipality in the Oberspreewald-Lausitz district, in Lower Lusatia, Brandenburg, Germany.
F60 is the series designation of five overburden conveyor bridges used in brown coal (lignite) opencast mining in the Lusatian coalfields in Germany. They were built by the former Volkseigener Betrieb TAKRAF in Lauchhammer and are the largest movable technical industrial machines in the world. As overburden conveyor bridges, they transport the overburden which lies over the coal seam. The cutting height is 60 m (200 ft), hence the name F60. In total, the F60 is up to 80 m (260 ft) high and 240 m (790 ft) wide; with a length of 502 m (1,647 ft), it is described as the lying Eiffel tower, making these behemoths not only the longest vehicle ever made—beating Seawise Giant, the longest ship—but the largest vehicle by physical dimensions ever made by humankind. In operating condition, it weighs 13,600 metric tons making the F60 also one of the heaviest land vehicles ever made, beaten only by Bagger 293, which is a giant bucket-wheel excavator. Nevertheless, despite its immense size, it is operated by only a crew of 14.
Bagger 293, previously known as the MAN TAKRAF RB293, is a giant bucket-wheel excavator made by the German industrial company TAKRAF, formerly an East German Kombinat.
P&H Mining Equipment designs, builds and supports a line of drilling and material handling machinery marketed under the "P&H" trademark and applied to minerals and energy surface mining operations worldwide. The firm is an operating subsidiary of Joy Global Inc. In 2017 Joy Global Inc. was acquired by Komatsu Limited of Tokyo, Japan and is now known as Komatsu Mining Corporation and operate as a subsidiary of Komatsu.
The Tagebau Hambach is a large open-pit coal mine in Niederzier and Elsdorf, North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany. It is operated by RWE and used for mining lignite.
A conveyor bridge is a piece of mining equipment used in strip mining for the removal of overburden and for dumping it on the inner spoil bank of the open-cut mine. It is used together with multibucket excavators, frequently bucket chain excavators, that remove the overburden which is moved to the bridge by connecting conveyors. Conveyor bridges are used in working horizontally layered deposits with soft overburden rock in areas where mean annual temperatures are above freezing. They are frequently used in lignite mining.
The Bergheider See, south of Finsterwalde near Lichterfeld in the county of Elbe-Elster in Germany, is a flooded pit from the former open cast mine of Klettwitz-Nord, northeast of the Lower Lusatian Heath. The lake was named after the old village of Bergheide, which had to be abandoned for the brown coal pit.
Ende Gelände 2018 were a series of events of a mass movement for climate justice in the Rhenish lignite mining area in Germany. The non-violent direct action civil disobedience events were targeted against coal-based power generation through RWE Power AG and demanded the "immediate fossil fuel phase-out" based on climate justice and climate change mitigation.
Villa Wolf was an architecturally significant building in Gubin, Poland, designed by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It is also known as Haus Wolf. The property was developed in Guben, Germany, between 1925 and 1926 – two decades before the Oder–Neisse line divided the city to create Gubin – for Erich and Elisabeth Wolf. It was one of the pioneering prototypes of modern architecture in Europe, and is considered the first modern work of Mies van der Rohe. It stood between two gardens parallel to the Lusatian Neisse river at Teichbornstraße 13 in today's Gubin, which at that time still belonged to Guben, but is now located in the Polish part of Lower Lusatia. It was destroyed during World War II in 1945 and there are plans to reconstruct it.
The Meuro mine was a former open-cast mine located in the state of Brandenburg, Germany that was in operation from 1958 to 1999. It was a source of lignite, often referred to as brown coal, which was used in local factories and power stations. It was one of a number of mines in the Lusatia area which left a massive water debt when the water was pumped out for the operation of the mine. This had to be remediated by the company, Lausitzer und Mitteldeutsche Bergbau-Verwaltungsgesellschaft (LMBV), a state-owned company. The area was flooded and converted into a multi-use recreation and tourism area.
