How the 1st Ever Deep Sea Mineral Extraction Vehicles Were Made - LONG VERSION

See how we made the world's 1st ever deep sea mineral extraction machines!

These three remotely-controlled mineral extraction machines, the largest of which is 300t were designed to extract massive sulphides in the Bismarck Sea off Papua New Guinea. The mineral deposit has an average depth of 1600m below mean sea level and they were produced back in 2016 for Nautilus Minerals Inc. an early pioneer in deep sea mineral exploration and extraction.

Each of these vehicles is controlled from the ship’s control room via an umbilical. This supplies power to multiple copper cores, as well as communications, data and control commands via fibre-optic cables, which are all wrapped in an armoured casing.

The 3 machines:

AUXILLIARY CUTTER: The first machine used as part of the extraction is the auxiliary cutter, which creates a level working surface for the subsequent bulk cutter and collector machines.

BULK CUTTER: The bulk cutter is the main production machine and the heaviest deep-sea mineral extraction unit ever built, weighing in at over a colossal 300 tonnes. Designing a ship-based launch and recovery system was challenging for something of this size so we settled on a cantilever system. The installed power of the cutter head is also bigger than any other rock cutter at 1.2MW. The power is supplied via an umbilical from the vessel.

COLLECTING MACHINE: In the planned extraction technique, the giant bulk cutter grinds up the seafloor with each pass, before the collector sucks up material from the piles made by the bulk cutter, which is then transferred via a riser pipe to the production support vessel on the surface, where it is dewatered.

For more information on our minerals projects you can check our brochure here: https://www.smd.co.uk/wp-content/uplo...

Or visit the minerals page of our website: https://www.smd.co.uk/minerals/

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