L.H.C.M. Inauguration

Jhanjra clocks another first with the inauguration of India's first Low Height Continuous Miner Project

Marking a transformational moment in the history of GCPL, India’s first Low Height Continuous Miner (LHCM) was inaugurated at Jhanjra on 28 March 2018. Sunil Chaturvedi – CMD (ISPL), along with S Chakravarty, CMD (ECL) and Dipankar Banerjee – COO, Mining (GCPL) inaugurated the package of machines comprising the LHCM (Cat), Shuttle Car (Phillips), Roof Bolter (RAM), Feeder Breaker (Ontrak), Load Haul Dump (Eimco Elecon) and Load Centre (Ampcontrol) at a grand event organized at Jhanjra. Just as GCPL and ECL have been collaborating to create many a success story at the Jhanjra project, the two teams again made elaborate arrangements and conducted the event with resounding success. The leadership team of ECL comprising S K Jha – Director, Tech, K.S.Patro – Director, D.B.Singh – CVO, A.M.Marathe – Director, Finance and Avijit Mallik – GM, Jhanjra project convened the celebrations along with the GCPL team comprising Kameshwar Rao-GM, Mining, Shantanu Sarkar – Project Manager, Jhanjra and all the members of the GCPL Jhanjra project team.

LHCM is a one-of-its-kind equipment. In India, quite a bit of the coal reserve cannot be mined due to want of compatible equipment and collective expertise. Deployment of the LHCM package sets a benchmark for the industry by creating an example of successful coal mining in low seam profile.

The LHCM is a remote controlled underground mining equipment, primarily used for coal extraction of seam thickness range of 1.5 – 2.5 meter and is used as a package with Shuttle Car, Roof Bolter, Feeder Breaker, Load Haul Dump and Load Centre. The LHCM is suitable for Bord & Pillar underground mining method for the extraction of coal and other soft minerals and promotes sustainability by extracting coal from low seam thickness mining condition, which in general is not possible with other mechanised mining methods. The equipment is built with self-diagnostics system and will reduce the total manpower, increase the overall safety, reduce the maintenance time and increase the daily production.

The newly inaugurated package, being used in India for the first time, has been deployed at Jhanjra 3&4 Incline mine while another set of equipment is proposed to be deployed in the month of June-July 2018. Each set of LHCM package will produce 0.36 Million Tonnes of coal per annum and after the deployment of both sets of LHCM, daily production of Jhanjra 3&4 Incline mine is expected to reach up to 2400 tonnes (approximately) from the current production of 200 tonnes (approximately).

Here are some mind-boggling numbers that one can truly feel proud of –

• The mine produced 3.1 MT which is highest ever in the history of Jhanjra Project Colliery beating its own milestone in the FY 2016-17.
• Jhanjra Project Colliery has achieved the highest production of 12,925 tes of coal in a single day on 23 February 2018.
• Highest production from Longwall in a day was 8600 tes on 5 January 2018.
• Highest production from Longwall in a month was 2,05,550 tes beating its own previous record.
• Highest Production from Continuous Miner – II in a day was 5050 tes on 31 March 2017, marking a national record.
• Highest production from Continuous Miner – II in a month of 78,506 tes in March, 2017.
• Highest production from Continuous Miner in any financial year recorded at 619,656 tes in 2017-18.

The successful implementation and execution of this project will enable Eastern Coalfields Limited to open up a new chapter of thin seam mining in India thus making Jhanjra project the largest underground operating mine in India.