Recent Developments
The British Ice Challenger exploration team used a screw drive in their Snowbird 6 vehicle (a modified Bombardier tracked craft) to traverse the ice floes in the Bering Strait. The rotating cylinders allowed Snowbird 6 to move over ice and to propel itself through water, but the screw system was not considered suitable for long distances, and the cylinders could be raised so that the vehicle could also run on conventional caterpillar tracks. 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).
Russian inventor Alexey Burdin has come up with a screw-propulsion system "TESH-drive Transformable worms".
More recently, commensurate with the ever increasing demand for commodities whilst refinery operational footprints remain within set boundaries, mud farming with the larger machines with deep profile penetration capacity (termed MudMasters by their manufacturer) has proven to be an efficient method for high intensity tailings management.
Read more about this topic: Screw-propelled Vehicle
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