Innovation and sustainability awarded

This year’s winners of the Wilhelm Haglund medal have together with key customers developed Leopard® DI650i, a Down-The-Hole drill rig, with AutoMine® surface drilling autocycle. When the drill rig was introduced in 2019, the larger than 6" segment was dominated by a competitor. The Sandvik Mining and Rock Solutions’ team included Pertti Parkkinen, Mika J. Nieminen, Jarkko Uotila, Juha Ketomäki, and Petri Suomi, and the aim was to develop a drill rig capable of challenging to become the market leader in this segment.

The drill rig is fully autonomous and incorporated with Autocycle and remote control capabilities, and it has a robust design to withstand the challenges posed by surface mining environments around the world.

“The DI650i drill rig is a very interesting combination of intelligent technology from top hammer drill rigs and traditional DTH drills, and when we combined it with an intelligent system for top hammer drill rigs we got a state-of-the-art DTH drill rig with scalable automation,” says category leader Juha Ketomäki.

This means that the operator can monitor the process remotely and one single operator can simultaneously operate three machines.

Sales for the drill rig has grown in a few years, from a very low market share to a market leading and solid position as the customers’ preferred choice in an important market segment.

Digitalized recycling program

Sandvik has been running buy-back programs for many years to retrieve used carbide tools, such as round tools, drills or inserts, from customers and recycle them into new products. The former system was not very efficient; it required a lot of manual work, lead times were long and transparency and traceability poor.

A team was formed across Sandvik Machining Solutions’ divisions, consisting of Maria Alexandersson, Jill Glynn, Malvina Roci, Kathrin Lampel, Eva Kyriakopoulou, and Sigrid Surkamp. The purpose of the program was to create a circular business model and retrieve more than 90 percent of the sold carbide volumes.

“We basically digitalized the solution,” says Maria Alexandersson, Customer Recycling Program Manager. “We developed a self-service portal where the customer with a few clicks gets the weight and price. We come and get the material and then ship it to Wolfram in Austria where they recycle the material.”

The advantages are numerous. The entire process is much simpler for the customer and the process is faster. The customer can also see how much it has contributed to CO2 reductions and how much material it has sent.

Sandvik, on the other hand, can benefit from increased traceability and knowing where the material originates from.