"Lord of the Mud" is an almost literal translation of the name of the only mass-produced MudMaster MM6 auger. It is produced by the Australian firm Residue Solutions Pty Ltd, which, according to some sources, supplied about 20 of these machines. No review of augers is complete without mentioning this type of machine.
MudMaster close-up. This machine does not have a mechanical drive to the augers, but electric, that is, the diesel works as a generator.
We will also start by mentioning this machine in the context of studying the possibilities of military use of augers, since a closer acquaintance with it reveals some very unexpected aspects of the auger.
It's clear! Not really…
With augers in military use, it would seem, everything is clear and the verdict about their unsuitability has long been passed and is not subject to special appeal. Yes, the auger is very good on liquid mud, but it cannot move on hard ground, on paved roads. I will not even give the usual list of counterarguments against augers, since, from a military point of view, they are very laughable.
The real reasons why augers never became a widespread type of machine were, in my opinion, two things.
The first moment. At the time of the birth of armored vehicles, both the auger and the track were well known to designers. There is even a surviving example of a Fordson with a screw engine. The Ford company offered its customers an additional set of augers, which were installed on a serial tractor. This is a 1920s technique.
One of the few surviving auger tractors
But the fact is that all parts and details of a caterpillar propeller could be manufactured by relatively simple and common methods in mechanical engineering: casting, forging, stamping. Wheels and rollers were usually cast, track links could be cast or stamped. But for the auger, a much more complex technology was required. The basis of the screw propeller was a pipe of large diameter, on which the screw ridge of the screw (in English, blade) was welded. The mass production of large-diameter pipes was mastered only in the 1960s, when methods of welding pipes either from two steel strips - strips, or from one strip coiled in a spiral appeared. Before World War II, there were no such technologies, and pipes with a diameter of more than 300 mm were almost never produced. Even the largest (and, therefore, rare and expensive) pipes were not suitable for any large auger equipment.
Second point. According to a 2010 dissertation by John T. Friberg at the University of South Florida, the first study of augers, the design and comparative efficiency of augers of different types was carried out only in 1961 by Dr. B. Cole in the UK. He researched and tested various auger designs and found the most advantageous ratios of diameter, length, height and ridge angle.
This is a very interesting point. In fact, early attempts to create an auger vehicle, whether it be Ford's Fordson or the M29 Weasel auger snowmobile project for the US Army (designed by Geoffrey Pyke), were based on purely empirical attempts, and the effectiveness of this type of technique could only come about by accident. The lack of knowledge of the principles of designing effective augers, combined with the technological difficulties of making a pipe of sufficient size, made the auger uncompetitive in comparison with the caterpillar.
Dr. Kohl found that the best ratio of auger diameter to length is 1: 6, that is, with a machine length of 6 meters, the auger diameter should be 1 meter. The optimum height of the ridge is 0.15 to the diameter of the screw, that is, with a screw diameter of 1000 mm, the height of the ridge should be 125 mm. The optimum angle of inclination of the ridge to the axis of the auger lies within 30-40 degrees.
The tests gave the following results. On hard and dry soils, the auger really showed itself poorly. On dry sand, the speed was 4 km per hour, and on dry and hard ground - 8 km per hour. The auger travels on hard ground, but slowly, and at the same time on dry sand rakes it in front of him, like a bulldozer. The addition of water radically changed the whole thing, and the auger was already showing good speed indicators: on the ground with water - 32 km per hour, on snow - 40 km per hour, on water up to 10 km per hour.
The Soviet auger ZIL-29061 makes its way through a swampy forest. Tanks have nothing to do in such an area.
Later machines, such as the ZIL-2906, DAF Amphirol and Riverine Utility Craft, built with these achievements in mind, showed an average speed over wetlands of 30 km per hour, and the Chrysler Riverine Utility Craft with aluminum augers reached speeds of up to 46 km in hour. This is already quite consistent with the speed of movement of tanks. For comparison, the T-72 developed a cross-country speed of 35-45 km per hour.
However, the results of Dr. Kohl's research had little impact on anything, although they opened up the possibility of creating effective augers. By the 1960s, the tracks of combat vehicles and tanks had long been worked out, got rid of many "childhood diseases", became familiar and widespread.
Today, you can again return to the design of augers, since the necessary technologies have appeared that make it possible to make pipes of large diameter (pipes for gas pipelines have, for example, a diameter of 1620 mm, which would give an optimal auger length of 9720 mm), technologies have appeared that make it possible to make screws from aluminum or composites, which would make them lighter, and there is also a theoretical groundwork that suggests how exactly they should be designed.
MudMaster features
MudMaster is a rather simple machine, the basis of which is a frame made of steel beams, at the corners of which auger suspension units are attached. A platform is installed on the frame, on which a diesel engine and a driver's cab are installed.
On the Russian-language Internet, articles have widely circulated in which this auger is portrayed as a kind of universal machine, a platform on which any equipment can supposedly be installed. It is difficult to say whether this was the result of a misreading of the materials or it was such a fantasy of the author who wrote about this auger. The fact is that there is nothing of the kind in the English materials. On the Residue Solution website, there is not a word at all about installing any equipment on the auger.
He has completely different tasks. MudMaster rolls slurry and tailings storage facilities. Actually, the very word residue from the name of the Australian company means "tail, waste" - waste from mining or metallurgical production. When bauxite is processed into alumina, a large amount of liquid mud - red mud remains, which is poured into special reservoirs surrounded by ramparts. In order not to build new sludge storage facilities for a longer time, a method was invented for tamping sludge with an auger. MudMaster slowly drives back and forth through the sludge storage, mixing the sludge and squeezing the water out of it with its weight, which evaporates. For 40 days of such work, the auger turns liquid mud into a dense and solid soil. The compacted sludge frees up space in the sludge storage and waste can be further discharged into it. A necessary but not very respectable job.
I must say that this is a poor but stable business. The auger manufacturer does not need to convince aluminum companies of the usefulness of their product, since sludge is a typical problem and a reason for constant clashes with environmentalists and local authorities. Liquid sludge overflowing the storage facility can break through dams and cause a "red flood". In October 2010, in the Hungarian city of Ajka, at the sludge storage facility of the Ajkai Timföldgyár Zrt plant, 1.1 million cubic meters of sludge was released from a dam break, which flooded the city of Kolontar and three adjacent districts. 10 people died, another 140 people were poisoned. For the company that owns the aluminum plant, this story ended with nationalization, and the head of the company, Zoltan Bakonyi, was imprisoned for some time, but then was released without charge.
Breakthrough sludge storage in Hungary
So tamp the sludge until it spills out somewhere - you don't even need to agitate. The Australian company must not even sell their augers, but rather rent them out or do the ramming themselves.
Perhaps one of the most important military applications of this particular design of augers stems from the MudMaster's ability to tamp soil - to make broken dirt roads passable again.
The experience of numerous wars, and especially of the Second World War, very clearly shows to what state wheeled and tracked vehicles can break dirt roads.
SS division "Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler" slightly bogged down near Vinnitsa
To a mash of liquid mud, in which trucks, tanks and even tractors are drowning, designed to pull all this equipment out of the mud. Many pages of the memoirs of the participants in that war, and from both sides, are devoted to painting pictures of mudslides. In any new war, even local, even large-scale, a similar situation will undoubtedly repeat itself, simply due to natural and climatic conditions. We must be ready for this and have special engineering vehicles for this.
The auger type MudMaster can be successfully used to restore dirt roads broken to mash. The first phase of such restoration consists in driving along such a road with the help of several or even several dozen augers and punching a rammed track along which wheeled or tracked vehicles can pass. After the auger, there are two beautiful hemispherical tracks in the section.
Ruts from the auger after soil compaction.
The second phase consists in the fact that the augers can pass one by one, on a ledge, along the entire width of the road, mix and tamp the soil, and also trim it with moldboard knives, which are not so difficult to hang on each auger. After that, the road can be finally leveled with a grader and covered with rubble, if necessary. Also, the compaction of the road with an auger can be combined with a bedding, since a body with a spreading device filled with gravel can be installed on the platform of the auger.
This operation can be repeated whenever the road condition begins to deteriorate. Also, the roads can be improved not only in summer, but also in winter, since the auger travels perfectly in the snow and also compresses it with its weight. Using augers can be an alternative to clearing snow from roads. In addition, the auger can punch and tamp a new road on virgin snow, optionally strengthening it by freezing ice, which is easy to do with the sprinkler installed on it, which is used to freeze ice crossings.
So even an unarmed (although it is not so difficult to install a large-caliber machine gun on it) and unarmored auger can be very useful in road engineering work in wartime, when the road needs to be fixed quickly, urgently and with the minimum possible effort.
