Screw-propelled vehicle
One of the earliest examples of a screw-propelled vehicle was designed by Jacob Morath, a native of Switzerland who settled in St. Louis, Missouri in the United States in 1868.
The machine was designed to haul logs, but its length and rigid construction meant that it had difficulty with the uneven winter roads for which it was intended.
In Oregon a stage line uses a snow motor in its two daily round trips over the Mackenzie Pass between Eugene and Bend.
The Royal Northwest Mounted Police have also gone into the market for snow motors, and may cease to be horsemen and become chauffeurs, to the deep regret of cinema people.
[9] With the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany in World War II, the quixotic Geoffrey Pyke considered the problem of transporting soldiers rapidly over snow.
The damage and casualties that a small force could inflict might be slight, but they would oblige the enemy to keep many men stationed in Norway in order to guard against every possible point of attack.
However, Pyke, who could be very inflexible, fell out with various individuals on the project and the Americans moved on to design a more conventional tracked vehicle, the M29 Weasel.
[12] In 1944, Johannes Raedel, a soldier of the German Army and veteran of the Eastern Front invented his schraubenantrieb schneemaschine (screw-propelled snow machine).
[13] According to Siegfried Raedel, son of Johannes: The vehicle idea evolved while looking at a meat mincer, also employing a screw type of compression.
During the Vietnam War, the American Waterways Experiment Station (WES) tested the Marsh Screw Amphibian, designed by the Chrysler Corporation.
[1] The Soviets built a screw-propelled vehicle, the ZIL-2906, specifically for the challenging task of recovering cosmonauts who landed in inaccessible areas.
It was powered by two modified DAF 44/55 variomatic transmission units; this made possible the significant innovation that the flanged cylinders could be deliberately driven in the same direction so that the vehicle could crab sideways on dry land at the alarming speed of 30 km/h (16 knots).
Also, when moving sideways, steering is effected by shifting the front of the cylinders so that they are no longer parallel – giving a large minimum turning radius.
Amphirols are used for ground surveying, for grooving the surface of newly drained polders to assist drying, and to carry soil-drilling teams.
The advantage of these machines to tailings densification is that they provide a means to allow water or process liquor to run off without repulping the profile.
However, the lighter, faster machines are better suited to marginal terrain access, but not densification due to repulping and their limited penetration depth.
The process of using these machines specifically for tailings and dredge spoil densification is commonly termed "mud farming" in the mining industry.
The Ice Challenger website says that the design was inspired by a Russian vehicle used to pick up cosmonauts who landed in Siberia (perhaps the ZIL-2906).
[23] More recently, mud farming with larger machines capable of deep profile penetration (termed MudMasters by their manufacturer) has proven to be an efficient method for high intensity tailings management.
