18 May 11
Engineering the rescue of the Chilean miners
“There were two other methods before ours,” Lyon recalls. “One was to raise a boring tool rotary to drill a hole into the mine and assemble a raised-bore head to carve backward from bottom up. Another method was to use an oil-field rotary. The difference with ours was to use percussion drilling: Have a big piece of steel accelerated back and forth and stroking a bit between 800 and 1,500 times a minute.”
Read the story of how the Chilean miners were rescued last October. Story courtesy of ASME.
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