From the Field
The fascinating future of mobile hydraulics At this Spring’s Fluid Power Technology Conference in
Milwaukee, three panelists from major OEMs discussed the future of mobile hydraulics, and what changes designers can expect to see in the coming years. Sitting on the panel were Gary Dostal, Manager – Mechanical Engineering, Komatsu Mining Corp.; Greg Downs, Senior Principal Engineer, Zoomlion Heavy Industry NA Inc.; and Gary Kassen, Engineering Director for Hydraulics and Pneumatics, CNH Industrial. One of the issues that has come up with mobile hydraulics for decades is whether electric actuation technology is a threat sitting somewhere out on the horizon. But Downs said that there’s still a ton of hydraulics on these large off-highway machines, and engineers should instead focus on electrical integration with hydraulics, which is actually a good thing. “There’s a lot of electronic controls on these machines,” he said. “I’ve been pushing to use more of the electric joysticks so that we can program and eventually get to where we can automate certain functions — for example, have automatic brake control for our excavators. There are different ways of doing that. You can assist for the operator and even have automated preprogram functions — and that’s the kind of direction I want to go. Eventually, you’ll be able to take a 3D model of what you want your landscape to look like, your grade or ditch or whatever, and program that in. And the excavator would automatically dig that profile.” Kassen explained that he doesn’t see any nearterm threat from electrics. “It’s going to be very hard in the next 10 years to displace hydraulics completely,” he said. “I do think there’s opportunity for electrification and I think it adds value to the hydraulics. If you can decouple the hydraulics from the engine, there’s a big opportunity for efficiency improvement and electric motors can provide that decoupling. You can also distribute your hydraulics. So, you’re not using a single pump to run all your functions. You can have multiple functions, multiple pumps around those questions.” 4
FLUID POWER WORLD
From The Field 10-19 FPW Vs2 MG.indd 4
10 • 2019
The IoT and mobile hydraulics According to Downs, a lot of diagnostics are moving to the cloud. He is seeing a lot of interest from rental fleets, where people want to know where their equipment is, and even be able to turn machines on remotely. “The biggest problem is, is keeping it secure so they can’t be hacked,” Downs said. “I can envision a machine center where they are not only working with single pieces of equipment, but equipment is working in concert with one another, maybe an excavator and a dozer are working together. We’re not quite there yet.” “I would say the big opportunity is improving reliability,” Kassen added. “The last thing our customers want is not to be able to get their work done. If we can, as an industry, tell them when their pump is going to fail or a hose is going to fail, that they can do preemptive maintenance so they’re not going to have downtime when they need the machine. I think that’s a big opportunity for our industry. Dostal agreed that reliability is a key gain to be had from the integration of the IoT and hydraulics. “The preemptive or predictive maintenance is pretty important. In the mining industry, especially when you’re working with some of the surface equipment, they try to schedule downtime,” he said.
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10/16/19 10:35 AM
