Recently, good news came from the site of the Hunan Dazhonghe Lithium Mine project: the "Longyuan" mining hard rock boring machine (China Railway 1103), jointly developed by China Railway Equipment and Dazhong Mining, successfully completed its tunneling task, marking the full breakthrough of the transport tunnel at the Jijiaoshan Lithium Mine in Linwu, Hunan. This breakthrough is not only a major advance in the intelligentization and construction-method transformation of non-coal mine tunnel development equipment in China, but also sets a new benchmark for the development of non-coal mine TBM technology.

As China's first "mining tool" tailor-made for lithium mine development, the "Longyuan" TBM has an excavation diameter of 6.3 meters and a total length of 155 meters. It undertook the tunneling task for the 7.3-kilometer transport tunnel of the Hunan Dazhonghe Lithium Mine project, with the entire route being uphill excavation at a comprehensive gradient of about 5.7% and a designed maximum burial depth of 558 meters. It had to pass through high-risk strata such as fault fracture zones and high-pressure water inrush areas, making construction extremely difficult. To effectively address the construction challenges of the transport tunnel, including long distance, large elevation difference and steep gradient, China Railway Equipment equipped the "Longyuan" TBM with a high-performance rock-breaking cutterhead, an efficient rock bolt drill, shotcrete and material transport systems, and a continuous mucking belt conveyor, enabling fully mechanized continuous operation of "excavation, support and transport" and boosting efficiency by more than ten times compared with the traditional drill-and-blast method.

Since its launch in April 2024, the "Longyuan" TBM has set domestic records for the longest single-head tunneling distance, the highest daily advance, the highest monthly advance and the highest average monthly advance for mining TBMs. From September to November 2024, the "Longyuan" TBM's cumulative advance exceeded 3,000 meters, with a single-month advance of 1,186 meters in September. This achievement stems from the innovative collaboration model between China Railway Equipment and Dazhong Mining. Through a 24-hour dynamic coordination mechanism, the two parties achieved precise alignment in key areas such as equipment maintenance, parameter optimization and support enhancement. Through systematic improvements such as optimizing the step-change amount, increasing the cycle rate and accelerating the advance speed, the equipment's tunneling efficiency was significantly improved, providing a replicable intelligent construction solution for the construction of national-level green mines.

To date, China Railway Equipment has developed a large number of non-coal mine TBMs, which have been successfully applied in multiple domestic mining projects, such as the Jiangxi Copper Yinzhu Mountain Lead-Zinc Mine, the Xi'an Mountain Iron Mine, the Duobaoshan Copper Mine, the Dazhonghe Lithium Mine, the Yian United Industrial Maping Phosphate Mine and the Sanshandao Gold Mine. The successful implementation of these projects further leads resource development toward safety, efficiency and intelligence.

In the future, China Railway Equipment will continue to deepen the transformation and application of shield/TBM and specialized equipment technologies, focus on developing unmanned equipment suitable for deep-earth mining and extremely hard rock geology, help improve the comprehensive utilization level and efficiency of lithium resources, promote the green and circular development of the lithium industry, and contribute more to the high-quality development of China's mining industry.