At Cayeli ... Rocket Boomer L2D rigs in the tunnels
Atlas Copco knows the drill for key projects
01 October 2001
Sweden's Atlas Copco is playing a key role in several projects from the Mediterranean coastline to the Black Sea including the Black Sea Highway, the Cayeli copper mine and the Berke, Akkopro and Cine dams.
Atlas Copco Group is a market leader in electric and pneumatic tools, compressed air equipment and generators, construction and mining equipment and assembly systems.
Highway
The 500 -km Black Sea Highway is the first part of a scheme which could eventually link up with the Trans-European road system, making it possible for trucks to drive from Georgia to northern Europe in just four days. The road starts at Hopa on the Georgian border and will run along the coast to Samsun, where it will join up with another road scheme which will go inland to Ankara to link up with existing roads going westward. The first 18 km of the highway, complete with 3-km tunnels, opened last October.
Turkish contractor Cengiz is building 120 km of the highway and built the first tunnels at Hopa. Excavation was carried out with hand-held Atlas Copco BBC 16 pneumatic rock drills and portable compressors.
Some 90 km along the coast from Georgia, Cengiz has also started work on the twin-tube Cayeli tunnels, which are 1.06 km long on the sea side and 1.36 km on the land side. The contractor will also construct two 500 m tunnels at a site 10 km to the east.
Two Atlas Copco Rocket Boomer L2D drill rigs have been purchased by the company to handle these two tasks. The first is developing the four faces off the central access on the tunnels and the second will open the east portals and work towards the central access.
Asim Cengiz, vice chairman of the Cengiz Group and project manager for the Black Sea Highway tunnels, says: "Atlas Copco served us well on the first tunnels and we expect no less on the ones under construction."
Copper Mine
A massive sulphide deposit with a total pre-mining resource of 19.7 million tonnes is being mined at Cayeli on the Black Sea. Production at the site, located 100 km from the Turkey-Georgia border, started in 1994 and 491,000 tonnes were produced in the following year. The mine is planned for transverse open stoping, with 20 m between sublevel drifts, and stopes can be from 10 m to 80 m long, containing ore of 30-40 MPa.
"This is an easy match for the Atlas Copco Boomer 282 rigs that form the backbone of the rig fleet used for development, in combination with the Atlas Copco loaders," the Swedish company said. "Two rigs are constantly at work driving the 7 m wide, 5 m high production drifts. The standard round can be up to 80 by 4 m holes, using 48 mm button bits, and up to five 2.4 m Swellex rock bolts are set for each metre advance."
Atlas Copco Wagner ST-6C and ST-8B Scooptrams, three of each, load the rock and are equipped with ejector buckets which discharge horizontally into the 33-tonne capacity mine trucks - three Wagner MT-433 and two MT-436B units.
Dams
Meanwhile, drilling and grouting equipment from Atlas Copco is playing a key role on three important dam projects which form part of hydropower developments along the Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey.
The dams are Berke on the River Ceyhan, at the eastern end of the coastline, Akkopro on the Dalaman river, towards the western end, and line on the river of the same name.
The equipment has been supplied to all sites by the Istanbul-based DBC Makina.
A key unit at the projects is the Diamec 262 all-hydraulic core drill for surface and underground drilling, which can also be equipped for top-hammer and down-the-hole drilling.
At Berke, where the dam will be 201 m high and the sides of the river gorge rise to around 500 m, total drilling will amount to almost 1 million m. The work is being carried out by 14 Diamec 262 rigs and 40 locally made units, with a design based on the Atlas Copco concept. Other equipment includes two CEMIX units, an electric-powered Mustang A32 rig with COP 64 hammer, two ROC crawler rigs and a Boomer 282 drilling rig.
At the Akkopro dam there are five Diamec 262 rigs - three crawler-mounted and two skid-mounted - and four Unigrout grouting units, two of them equipped with Pumpac units to pump grout with a high sand content over long distances. The first Unigrout delivered has reportedly been running 24 hours a day for four months.
Around 20 million cu m of limestone for rockfill is being quarried some 5 km from the dam site, using an Atlas Copco ROC F7 rig equipped with the Coprod system and two ROC 742HC units.
The construction method for the line dam, which will provide potable water and irrigation as well as power generation, is RCC (roller compacted concrete), and it is the first time this has been used in Turkey.
The method involves a mix of cement, ash and aggregate, with no water. First, a series of layers are compacted using a rotating cylinder. Then the dam is built up in 30 cm layers of RCC, each followed by a 4 cm layer of normal concrete.
Five Diamec 262 drills have been supplied to the site - two crawler-mounted and diesel powered, and three skid-mounted electric units - which are used for both coring and in-the-hole drilling. One of the Unigrout units at the site is equipped with the new Pumpac high capacity grout pump.
Mahmut Ulusoy, project manager for the drilling and grouting work, says: 'The Diamec machines are excellent and extremely fast, achieving 90 m per day drilling 20 to 25-m holes for the grout curtain of the coffer dam. This equipment is playing an invaluable role in the success of the project.'
