NORTH IDAHO COLLEGE

Heavy Equipment Engineering

Past, Present, Future

Matthew Harned 12/3/2013

Heavy Equipment Engineering

12/3/2013

Heavy Equipment Engineering

The Industrial Revolution in the 1780s through the 1840s left no industry untouched. People throughout America began to understand the potential of machines of all kinds, and agricultural advancement was at the center of the revolution. The limitations of the horse became obvious, and the development of the steam engine introduced a power source that was immediately adapted to a wide variety of applications, beginning with the tractor. Another major breakthrough was the diesel engine, invented in 1893 by Rudolf Diesel. By the 1930s diesel power was being used in trains, ocean-going cargo ships, and tractors, and such names as Caterpillar and Cummins were established. The entire history of earth-moving equipment has been guided by the need for more power, durability, and efficiency of design. Caterpillar has been a major name in the industry since Benjamin Holt incorporated the track system used today into his steam tractors in 1904. By the 1910s, Holt was a large supplier of machinery for the Allies in World War I, sending armored bulldozers to the trenches. Holt sold 2,100 tractors to the Army. In spite of some lawsuits and the post-war economic downturn (not to mention the influx of military surplus tractors returning from Europe), the company grew, and between 1925 and World War II had introduced many models, selling over 395,000 of these before discontinuation (Caterpillar history, n.d.). With the advent of a practical Diesel engine and the giant public works projects from the New Deal in the 30s, the trend in heavy equipment was always towards larger, more powerful machines. World War II production of D7 Cat crawler-tractors was at 1,100 a month. Military sales during the war totaled approximately 51,000 (History, n.d.). Since then the company has grown and expanded worldwide, with sales and revenue of $65.875 billion in 2012 (Securities, 2013). Another major name in earthmoving history is R.G. LeTourneau, born in 1888. A highschool dropout, he held various odd jobs, including farm hand, iron foundry apprentice, welder, and auto mechanic. At one point, to work off a debt, he repaired and operated an old Holt tractor for a farmer, pulling a scraper to level 40 acres of farmland. This strategy became the cornerstone of his successful company. Before long, LeTourneau owned a Holt tractor and built himself a scraper and operated the setup on local leveling contracts. He developed novel and

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ingenuitive machines, and tested them out on his own jobs. Then he added improvements and produced and sold the machines to other contractors. This two-part business plan earthmoving contracting and equipment engineeringserved him well for years. His most important breakthroughs include: The use of rubber tires in earthmoving equipment, in place of steel wheels Numerous developments in scrapers, including telescoping buckets and the self-

propelled scraper unit The diesel-electric drive system, with motors in each wheel hub, eliminating

transmissions, differentials, and axles The two-wheeled tractor unit, now used to pull machinery of all kinds In 1965 R.G. LeTourneau Inc. earned the respect, if not the business, of the industrial earthmoving world with the launch of his LT-360 scraper. This machine was made of three scraper units, with a total of eight 16-cylinder diesel engines, hooked together like train cars; the middle unit held the cab, from which a single operator controlled all the functions of each section. It had 122-inch tires, was 200 feet long, and worked exactly one contract. In his book LeTourneau Earthmovers, Eric C. Orlemann describes the machines performance: The LT-360s performance was impressive to say the least, considering that this machine was still in its design phase. The LT-360 was able to load 360 tons of earth in about 80 seconds, with a traveling top speed of 15-20 miles per hour as it traveled to the dumping site. It was able to dump this load in just 40 seconds, spreading it evenly 8-10 inches deep as each of the bowls ejectors pushed it out With 4,760 gross horsepower pushing and pulling each of the scraper units cutting blades through the earth at 6 miles per hour, the inertia of the earth as it was being loaded actually caused it to jump into the telescoping bowl sections. And all of this was done without the aid of the additional pusher tractors (Orlemann, 2001, p. 108). Although only one example was built, the LT-360 was the largest scraper in the world. That record still stands.

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Besides scrapers, the company has also built offshore oil drilling platforms; logging implements such as jungle crushers, giant four-wheel-drive saws, and land trains for hauling hundreds of logs; and mobile missile launchers for the Army. In his autobiography, Mover of men and mountains, R.G. LeTourneau describes the action of the jungle crusher: In its current version the jungle crusher looks like a giant steam roller, with its front and rear rollers studded with ax blades. It is 74 feet long, 22 feet wide, 19 feet high, and weighs 280,000 pounds So vast is its power that against a jungle of trees four feet thick and 150 feet high, it crushes them like corn stalks at the rate of four acres an hour The ax-blades of the roller reach the tree and start chewing their way upward. The whole machine rears up like a

dinosaursomething has to give, and so far it has always been the tree. (LeTourneau, 1960) Today the company builds extreme heavy-duty machinery for mining applications, including the L-2350 Generation 2 front-end wheel loader, the largest in the world. As described by a sales flyer, it runs off of a 2300 horsepower turbocharged V-16 and four electric wheel motors. It comes standard with a 53-yard bucket capable of dumping a 160,000 pound load over a 20foot-high barrier. The high-dump option can load 150,000 pounds over 23 feet high. It can carry 1305 gallons of fuel, the tires weigh over seven tons each, and the LINCS-II computerized control system displays load weight and other relevant data on a touchscreen in the cab and can record months of data as well as display diagnostic information for technicians (L-2350, n.d.). Technology has moved a long way from the steam engines and wooden tracks on Benjamin Holts old Caterpillars. I had the opportunity to speak with a product designer at Ground Force Worldwide, a mining equipment manufacturing company in Post Falls, Idaho. One of Ground Forces signature products is a modified Caterpillar 120 M2 Tier 4 AWD motor grader, refitted for underground mining. Some of the modifications include a completely redesigned cab, with a roofline two feet lower than the standard machine from Caterpillar, from about 122 inches down to just over 8 feet tall. They also shorten the overall length of the

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machine a full 36 inches by cutting and re-welding the gooseneck. The blade is also shortened, narrowing the width by two feet. This more compact, more maneuverable edition is better suited to underground conditions, while still having all the power and functionality of the standard Cat grader. Another feature of Ground Forces version is roll-over and falling objects protection systems (ROPS/FOPS). For a height gain of just a few inches, the grader s cab can be ROPS/FOPS certified. The hydraulic ram that Ground Force uses to test prototype cabs can apply thirty tons of force to the side of the cab. Another test involves dropping a five hundred pound steel slug onto the roof from twenty feet high; this test delivers an energy of over 13,500 joules without damaging the roof of the cab enough to injure the operator. Ground Force Worldwide claims to make the worlds largest water tank trucks, with capacities in excess of sixty thousand gallons (Ground Force, n.d.). This model weighs a hundred and two thousand pounds, empty. Some of their smaller models have hydraulic actuators that tilt the tank and place it on the ground, allowing the operator to leave the tank at the worksite. The company also makes fuel and lube trucks with high-speed pumps that can re-fuel a bulldozer or excavator at up to three hundred gallons a minute. They make dump trucks with heated boxes, to prevent material from freezing and sticking. Walker Bentley is a product designer for Ground Force, and has been an employee for nearly three years. He described to me the process of producing a new machine. A critical first step is ensuring that the company knows exactly what the customer

wants: communication is frequent and detailed, involving several days of correspondence, including preliminary sketches. Bentley then spends several days, if necessary, designing any special features the

customer wants. A bill of materials is composed for miscellaneous parts or electronics. Throughout the manufacturing process, teamwork is a critical part; Bentley keeps

communication up with the sales department, parts department, and other engineers who will check his work. He frequently meets with the production department to explain anything that needs to be clarified and to answer any questions about the drawings. He

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checks on the manufacturing department regularly to make sure everything is going as intended. If the company is producing a brand new machine that they have never manufactured

before, the design process may take eight weeks, and the manufacturing may take twelve to sixteen. A notable exception to this was a particular motor grader model that the management wanted ready before a certain mining equipment expo in Nevada; the entire machine was designed and constructed in 52 days. When I arrived at the Ground Force office, Bentley was drafting a part for a highcapacity cable reel truck on SolidWorks. The part was a bracket for a hydraulic piston that will tilt the entire cable reel platform back, in order to pull at a more effective angle on descending cables. The platform was on a turret that has 180 degrees of rotation, to spool up cable coming in from the side. At the rear of the platform, the cable guide system, consisting of horizontal and vertical rollers, is mounted on a chain-drive that moves it from side to side. Bentley described to me how this movement feeds the cable evenly onto the spool, and how it is guided by proximity sensors that reverse its direction automatically. Their largest cable reel trucks are capable of controlling up to almost half a mile of 4-inch-diameter cable. One of the options that the company offers is self-loading ability; the truck picks up and sets down the spools. Bentley came to Ground Force Worldwide with three years of previous drafting experience, creating SolidWorks drawings for a small building firm in Nampa. Previous to this, he attended the University of Idaho, taking engineering and math classes. He has worked for three years at Ground Force, designing machinery built to last. He told me that durability is the primary characteristic that clients are looking for. Mining equipment undergoes tremendous loads in often less-than-ideal environments; in fact, some operators push equipment beyond its ratings, and Ground Force expects its designs to continue to perform. Heavy equipment engineering will continue to become more advanced as the goals and requirements of the industry change. Already there exist advanced GPS guidance tools for more accurate grading, and soon more and more functions of earthmoving machines will be

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automated by electronic computer systems. Instead of estimating grade levels by looking out the window or measuring depth with a yardstick, an operator can now check a screen displaying a real-time virtual model of the grade from a 3-D scanner on the machine, complete with detailed information on how to guide the blade within a precision of millimeters. Explains Joel Seddon, Position Partners machine control product manager: By adding a LiDAR scanning device to the 3D machine control system that works with a positioning reference from GPS, operators would be able to view live cut/fill volumes and surface changes inside the cab. This information could also be made instantly available to the office using existing telematics solutions (Seddon, 2013). Topcon Positioning is a company that specializes in a technology system relying on GPS to guide earthmoving equipment. One of their products is called 3D-MC2 Dozer. This system, added onto a bulldozer, consists of a GPS receiver, an in-cab control box, a blade position sensor that sends position data 100 times a second, and some hydraulic control valves. The operator drives the bulldozer along a line, and the 3D-MC2 system controls the blade. The company claims that the system is fast enough and accurate enough to double the productivity of a bulldozer, and even negate the need for a grader to finalize the grade (Topcon, n.d.). Teleoperation also continues to become more sophisticated even as its operator interface becomes simpler and smoother. An article called The State of the Art in Automation of Earthmoving by Sanjiv Singh, a system scientist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, describes a control system for a backhoe in which the operator manipulates a scaled-down version of the machine; moving the joints of the master causes identical movements in the slave doing the work. The uses for such a control system include the excavation of hazardous waste or the placement of explosives (Singh, 1997). Note that this description was made over fifteen years ago. Soon, complete automation of machinery will be possible, making use of a plethora of proximity sensors, 3D scanners, GPS equipment, and decision-making programs to complete tasks more precisely and more efficiently.

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References:

Caterpillar history. (n.d.). Antique Caterpillar Machinery Owners Club. Retrieved from http://www.acmoc.org/about-caterpillar Ground Force Worldwide website. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://gfworldwide.com/product/water-trucks/ History. (n.d.). Caterpillar.com. Retrieved from http://www.caterpillar.com/company/history L-2350 generation 2 sales flyer. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.letourneauinc.com/mining/resources/docs/L-2350-2.pdf LeTourneau, R.G. (1960). Mover of men and mountains. Chicago: Moody Press. Orlemann, E. (2001). LeTourneau earthmovers. St. Paul: MBI Publishing Company. Securities and exchange commission, form 10-K. (2013). SEC database. Retrieved from http://pdf.secdatabase.com/1699/0000018230-13-000075.pdf Seddon, J. (2013). Whats next for machine control. Machineguidance.com.au. Retrieved from http://www.machineguidance.com.au/cicms/assets/pdfs/pg85as230.pdf Singh, S. (1997). The state of the art in automation of earthmoving. ASCE Journal of Aerospace Engineering. 10(4), p.12. Retrieved from http://www.fieldrobotics.org/~ssingh/pubs/asce97.pdf Topcon website. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.topconpositioning.com/products/machinecontrol/3d/3d-mc2-dozer

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