Study of the Backhoe’s Digging Modes at Rock Face Working-Out

As is known from the classic works on open pit mining, the bench is a separately developed part of the rock layer, having the form of a step. It should also be noted that it is necessary to clearly differentiate the concepts of “bench height” and “height of the layer to be removed.” The benches are often divided into subbenches, developed by different excavation equipment or by the same equipment both sequentially and simultaneously, but having transport routes that are uniform for the bench. As an example, an excavator stripping of the upper and lower subbenches with loading, respectively, at the level of the excavator and above this level, is usually given, that is, the transport route (road) passes through an intermediate platform bench located in the middle of its height. Therefore, the excavation layer of any height, which is, in fact, a part of the working bench, can be considered as an independent bench with all its attributes, but in order to avoid duplication of definitions, this paper suggests the name “extraction layer”. When developing this element various digging modes can be applied. In this paper, we studied the main modes and selected the one that provides the highest performance.