What is a drum cutter ? What is a hydraulic drum cutter ?

Drum Cutters, also called Hydraulic Drum Cutters, is a hydraulic attachment used with excavators and can be widely used in tunnels, ditches, engineering construction, rock excavation and other construction fields.   It has the advantages of high efficiency, precision and low cost. According to the structure of the milling head of the excavator, it can be divided into two basic types: 

     Horizontal Drum Cutters and Vertical Drum Cutters.

      Drum Cutters Structure

The Drum Cutter is mainly composed of hydraulic motor, transmission system and drum cutters machine. As the executive component, the drum cutter is one of the most important parts of the hydraulic milling machine. 

The structure of the hydraulic drum cutters mainly includes the milling machine,  and the milling machine seat, among which the milling machine directly participates in the material of the milling machine, and its layout and structural parameters directly affect the movement and dynamic performance of the hydraulic drum cutters.   It has become the key content of the milling machine design; due to the complexity of the milling machine process, this part of the design is also a difficult point in the design of the hydraulic milling machine.

Advantages of Drum Cutters

As a new type of engineering machinery, drum cutters can be installed on any type of hydraulic excavator, effectively replacing tunnel excavation and contour correction, channel groove milling, building demolition, asphalt concrete road milling, rock frozen soil milling, root milling and other fields .

The advantages of drum cutters are:

1. Wide range of milling. In low-hardness rocks such as weathered rock and tuff, the maximum milling efficiency can reach 25-120m3/h (different from rock density and fragmentation), or there is no steel or a small amount of reinforced concrete, and a high-power milling machine can easily mill 30mm below the diameter of reinforced concrete; 

2. Low vibration and low noise. Blasting construction can effectively replace restricted blasting areas (such as shallow buried tunnels or rock fracture areas), reduce disturbance to surrounding rocks, and protect the environment; 

3. Accurately control construction and quickly and accurately repair structural contours. The application of tunnel excavation can not only solve the headache problem of the construction unit, but also reduce the cost increase caused by the construction unit’s debt; 

4. The particle size of the milling material is small and uniform, which can be directly used as backfill; 

5. Good security. Artificial tunnels use drum cutters instead of soft or broken rocks, which eliminates the risk of workers digging in front of their hands and greatly improves the safety of tunnel construction;

 6. The structure is simple and the use is convenient. It can be installed on any existing hydraulic excavator, and can use the hydraulic circuit of hydraulic breaker or hydraulic tong, and the user does not need to purchase an additional excavator.

Hydraulic Drum Cutter Construction Technology

Hydraulic drum cutterss have many working conditions, and under different working conditions, hydraulic drum cutters have different stress conditions. For example, in the soil trenching project, the hydraulic drum cutters can be fully submerged in the soil, and all the hydraulic drum cutters are involved in the work.

When milling medium and low hardness materials, the stress conditions of each are not bad. Even if the stress of each hydraulic drum cutter is very different, compared with the designed working capacity, the uneven or local stress will not have a great impact on the work of the hydraulic drum cutter.

But in the hard rock milling process, due to the high hardness of the rock and the worst stress, the rock can only be milled at a small drilling speed, and in the horizontal milling process, only the horizontal milling can be performed with a small milling thickness.

In this working state, not all the hydraulic drum cutters in the arc section participate in the work, especially in the horizontal milling process, only the hydraulic drum cutters at the intersection of the straight line section and the arc section can participate in the milling work.