Development of the mesh clamp and its evaluation

With mine owners and operators continuously looking to increase development rates and reduce extraction costs, whilst maintaining safety, the need to develop new innovative products has never been in higher demand. Working with the mining industry, Sandvik has recently developed and released a mesh clamp, which is designed to work with Sandvik’s MD and MDX bolt range. The mesh clamp enables the installation of mesh sheets to be quicker, safer and more cost-effective. The major challenge of designing the mesh clamp was to keep the design simple whilst still meeting the requirements of installation flexibility and remaining inobtrusive to the surrounding work area. After several design iterations were laboratory and field tested, a final concept was agreed upon. The systems performance of the mesh clamp and the mesh needed to be evaluated. This required the development of a unique laboratory test rig to simulate the relevant test environment and loading conditions. Laboratory test results proved that the mesh clamp is stronger than the 100 × 100 × 5.6 mm welded wire mesh. The mesh and mesh clamp arrangements were tested until failure occurred, at full mesh load capacity, where the mesh and mesh clamp performed well as a system to absorb a minimum of 50 kN with up to 250 mm of vertical mesh displacement.