As rotary blasthole drill technology continues to advance, Sandvik’s iSeries family of intelligent drills continues to grow to meet evolving customer demands – as can be seen with the Sandvik DR410i drill rig.

Considered a “compact, powerful, technologically advanced rig designed to produce the lowest-cost clean hole”, the DR410i assists mining operations to enhance productivity, while reducing the total cost of ownership in coal, copper and gold mines.

The DR410i is designed for both hard and soft rock drilling environments, explains Sandvik rotary drills product manager Craig Hall, who adds that “it can be fitted with compressor packages as well as rotary drilling packages”.

The DR410i was designed “from the ground up” with more than 60 000 engineering hours dedicated to the project.

The drill rig is the third in Sandvik’s iSeries, and Hall says the company has “really managed to leverage the overarching control system used on the iSeries products”.

The same architecture is used across all of Sandvik’s products, such as drills and underground equipment, and is considered a common platform across Sandvik’s product range.

Commenting on the need for the new drill, Hall refers to an increasing market trend towards bigger drills, which essentially do the same job, as well as a trend towards “overcapitalising on requirements”.

“[Sandvik] saw that there was an opportunity to deliver a powerful, flexible midsize drill to the market and to reduce the need to go up in class and operational costs,” he says.

Key design criteria incorporated into the drill comprised a focus on technology, productivity, maintainability and sustainability.

On the technology front, Sandvik focused on delivering a technical solution that can add to the complete excavation process and not just the drilling. This includes onboard operator assist functions and off-board remote systems and data delivery.

The productivity focus was on functionalities that increase the machine productivity, from leveraging the technology that Sandvik built into the machine, to increasing the single pass capability to a 14 m clean hole.

Maintainability, meanwhile, included a lot of effort in how the machine was designed to increase the uptime, reduce downtime and reduce the amount of man and machine interface time, Hall explains.

With intelligent pump and power pack controls, the DR410i’s sustainability aspect manages the entire system live to reduce the total energy consumption and overall carbon footprint of the machine to reduce fuel burn.