Consumable Carbide Tips for TBM Shield Cutters

We have prepared A wide range of cutting knives, buckets, rippers and other tools complement the spectrum for operations in loose soils. 

With rich experience behind us, we are capable of making sure every single piece of tungsten carbide match your requests and become ready for the reliable usage of our customer.

Selection of TBM carbide tips

The choice of this cutting tool is allowed to change during the tunnel operation. Nonetheless, we still recommend the tactic of using an exclusive type of carbide tips for different targeted strata from the outset, considering downtime and maintenance. 

When penetrating hard gravelly and sandy soils, disc cutters should be applied. Using rippers for medium hard rocks and soils. Scrappers go for softer soil and crumbly rocks.

Diversity of our tips

Ring cutter (disc cutter)

Fit to drilling not only hard but loose strata containing gravels with the diameter bigger than 400mm, but also mixed ground with clay, sand, and rocks with 30Mpa UCS. It is to crush the rocks by the extruding force, shearing force and tensile force formed by cutter rolling. We are able to provide tips and buttons mounted on disc cutter for strata which consist of gravels with a diameter bigger than 400mm.

Tooth tipped scraper

Scraper tools are used to route the loose soil to the cutter head’s chamber.installed on the extreme edge of Cutter Head. It is used to cut the soft soil around the Cutter Head to keep the same excavation diameter. With superior penetrability on rocks with compression resistance not exceeding 80 MPa and moderate hardness are one of our specialties.

In most cases, scrapper is composed of a knife body, end carbide blades, and carbide buttons welded on its back. It is a kind of tool for processing in cohesive soil and slurry. This kind of tool is usually installed on both sides of cutter head. Its mechanism is to use the axial and radial shearing force, which is generated by the rotation of cutter head, to insert the excavated ground and evaluate the resulting sediment.

Periphery scraper

It’s a sort of auxiliary cutters equipped with carbide buttons and teeth on the periphery region of the cutter head. They are responsible for protecting cutter head, cutter holder, foam filling hole, and inject hole, basing on their different roles. It is also to remove the stone slag crushed by disc cutters and pre-cutting bits.

Tooth ripper

Sometimes disc cutter can’t rotate and effectively cut through soft rocks because there is no output of enough fraction force between them. Proceed with that, disc cutters are substituted with rippers with inserts for Rock breakage efficiency in soft formations.

This type of ripper puts the surface of the rock under the axial force caused by the penetration of the insert plates instead of shear stress. It’s used for cutting and digging rocks harder than 100mPa

Button tipped ripper

During TBM processes in sandy formations, especially those with gravels in large diameters, disc cutters will gradually lose its penetrability. Thus, button tipped ripper specializes in this case cause spherical shaped buttons of it punch those cobbles in small pieces, which results in the invalidation problem of disc cutters getting solved.

center fishtail cutter

Center fishtail cutters to deal with the issue of pre-cutting and fixation of the whole cutter head are available.

Selection of carbide grades

On the level of metallurgy and material, carbide has shown for years of the best choice of smashing rocks in small pieces for readily evacuation. It has been proven to be the ideal material offering sufficient strength and wear-resistance to all TBM tools. The grades of our TBM inserts achieve an ideal balance between wearing, impact, and excellent corrosion resistance moreover.

Our service

What solution we can competently offer you is to save your precious time to find any other source of carbide tips. Costs of these specialized cutters can be offset by the longer cutter life and reduced number of cutter changes.

We will keep studying the specific terrain and your project to work. Besides, Cooperate with you to design. We will try our best to achieve the most demanding and cost-effective working results by these cutter material’s favorable quality.

We have a strict QC system, and every batch of material will be tested in density, HRA, TRS, and magnetic saturation after the production. the test report will be kept in our files or sent to you for the reference and tracking data.

Other special or customized carbide tips can be produced as per the request of our clients.