Wassara - Water Powered Drilling Systems

Wassara offers the mining and construction industry complete systems for effective drilling in soil and rock, based on our core competence in water-powered drilling. The heart of all the systems is the patented Wassara in the hole hammer, which is powered by high-pressure water instead of air. For the mining industry Wassara offers two different systems: the Wassara production drilling system and the Wassara slot drilling system.

The Wassara Production drilling system is used for drilling blast holes and Wassara Slot drilling system which is used for inverted blind slot raise drilling and ventilation shaft drilling. All components in the systems have been designed to give a total overall optimum performance.

WATER POWERED DRILLING SYSTEM

Wassara water-powered drilling systems has enabled Swedish mining company LKAB to scale up its sublevel caving operation in the iron ore mines in Kiruna and Malmberget by roughly a factor two. This is due to the fact that the Wassara system drills very long straight holes which results in well fragmented ore after blasting. This has made it possible to increase the distance between sublevels from 15m to 30m, resulting in large cost savings for LKAB.

IN THE HOLE HAMMER

The systems also have a number of environmental benefits. Since the hammer runs on clean water without any oil additives it results in a working environment free of dust particles and oil mist. Since a high-pressure water pump is much more efficient than an air compressor the energy consumption is roughly 25% of a comparable air drilling system. A side effect of this is of course that there is also a reduction of CO2 emission, highly important in these times of global warming.

PRODUCTION DRILLING SYSTEM

The Wassara Production drilling system consists of hammers, bits, check valves, drill tubes, high pressure swivels, high pressure hoses and electric high pressure water pumps. It was originally developed for Swedish mining company LKAB who were in search of a drilling method which could enable them to scale up its mining operations. Neither air hammers nor top hammers were deemed suitable for this task.

Up to this date LKAB has drilled more than 10,000,000m with the system. More and more mines are now beginning to discover the benefits of the Wassara system.

BLAST HOLE DRILLING

The first step is to drill the pilot hole. Then the pilot tube is inserted into the pilot hole. The second hole is then drilled parallel to the pilot hole thanks to the pilot tube. The procedure is then repeated, that is when the third hole is to be drilled the pilot tube is inserted in the second hole and so on.

When the required number of slot holes has been drilled, the blast holes are drilled. The advantage is that the blast holes can be optimized regarding direction and numbers with respect to the slot. Blasting is then performed towards the slot.