High Drilling Rate and Long Service Life Percussive Rock-Drilling Tools: A Hundred-Year Puzzle for World Excavation Industry after Inventions of Industrial Explosives

The nitroglycerine dynamite for road building and mining invented 150 years ago by Nobel, a Sweden, after the invention of Chinese explosives, initiated the industrial revolution in its true sense that brought about high speed growth of social wealth. In 1923, a German invented WC Co cemented carbide, resulting in two major industries of hard alloy cutting tools and hard alloy rock drilling bits. As a consequence, the machine and excavating and mining industries grow rapidly. The cemented carbide is thus termed as the "industrial teeth". In particular, up to now, the modern rock drilling blasting technology has turned into a major means for the human being to obtain resources from the lithosphere and to expand the survival and development space to the underground. In particular, the rock drilling rods are the consumption tools with the smallest range of pressure conditions and the shortest service life in all the machine tools. This kind of rods, indispensable to the basic industry, is of high technology. The manufacture of long service life percussive rock drilling rods has already turned into an important engineering technology puzzle in the 21st century for the global excavation industry that requires highly efficient and low consumption drilling rods. The realization of this target needs the long term cooperation from many experts in rock drilling, blasting, rock fracturing, mining, materials, metallurgy, iron and steel, machine, physics, chemical industry, electronics, mathematics, mechanics and biology (bionics). The establishment of the Chinese modern rock drilling tools industry marked by new types of "cemented carbide drilling tools" and "long service life percussive rock drilling rods" is a new development point strategic to the new generation of "resources high tech export oriented" Chinese national industry.