Electric rope shovels are widely used in surface mining operations due to their large production capacities. These shovels use crawler tracks for terrain engagement. Shovel reliability, maintainability and availability rely on track service life. Fatigue failure of crawler tracks, in rugged and abrasive geological formations, occurs extensively causing high maintenance costs and production losses. This study investigates the crawler-formation interaction in tough and rugged terrains of oil sands for understanding crawler failure problems. The governing equations of crawler-formation interaction kinematics have been formulated for link pin joint, oil sands joint and driving constraints to capture crawler motion during shovel production based on the rigid multi-body theory. The crawler is powered with translation and rotation driving constraints to produce driving and turning propel motion son the rugged oil sands terrain.

The kinematic modeling of a 3-D crawler-terrain interaction shows that the crawler motion on oil sands terrain develops132 degrees of freedom (DOFs) and dynamic modeling is required to calculate those DOFs. A 3-D virtual prototype model of the crawler-formation interactionis builtin MSC. ADAMS based on the rigid-body kinematics to simulate the crawler propel motion for given driving constraints. The results from the driving constraints yield a non-linear longitudinal motion of the crawler track assembly. The track's lateral and vertical displacements during translation fluctuate between 0.7 and 3.6 cm. The maximum longitudinal, lateral and vertical velocities are 0.22, 0.046 and 0.56 m/s, while the maximum accelerations along longitudinal, vertical and lateral directions are 7.41, 34.9 and 1.73 m/s2, respectively. This research forms the basis for modeling rigid-flexi blevirtual simulator of the crawler-terrain interaction for predicting crawler fatigue life.