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Oil, Gas & Mining vocabulary · Heavy Equipment

Excavator

Meaning in oil, gas & mining, with examples

/ˈekskəveɪtər/nounCore term

In oil, gas & mining, excavator means: A large digging machine with a boom, arm and bucket on a rotating cab, used in mines to dig rock and load it into trucks.

In Turkish: ekskavatör, kazıcı

How it is used

Large mining excavators are hydraulic machines or electric rope shovels; operators talk about bucket size, cycle time and loading trucks. A backhoe excavator digs toward the cab, while a face shovel digs away from it. Together these machines are called loading units.

Example sentences

  1. The excavator loads a 220-tonne truck in four passes.

  2. One of the excavators is down for a hydraulic repair, so production will be lower today.

Common collocations

  • hydraulic excavator
  • excavator operator
  • excavator bucket
  • load trucks
  • haul truckA very large dump truck used in open-pit mines to carry ore and waste rock from the loading area to the crusher, a stockpile or the waste dump.
  • open-pit mineA mine where ore is dug from the surface in a large, stepped hole that gets wider and deeper over time, instead of through underground tunnels.
  • overburdenThe soil and waste rock lying on top of an ore body or coal seam, which must be removed before the valuable material can be mined.
  • conveyorA machine with a moving rubber belt on rollers that carries ore, coal or rock continuously from one place to another, for example from a crusher to a stockpile.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Heavy Equipment

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