Three and a half years later, in late October 2022, Bauma Exhibition will be held again in Munich Exhibition Center, and China will become the tenth exhibitor country.
Due to the epidemic situation and other factors, the author and many domestic colleagues did not go to the exhibition in person, but they were able to watch the exhibition remotely through the Internet. In addition to seeing the wonderful appearance of many Chinese and overseas enterprises at Bauma, what the author really wanted to say was that the Munich Bauma Exhibition was not only a global highland for construction machinery manufacturers to display their products and technologies, but also the most advanced process Technology and solution platform.
Of course, another key significance of bauma 2022 is that, as such a traditional industry in the world, after more than two years of the impact of the COVID-19, the construction machinery industry is an opportunity for all people in the industry to regain confidence, just as the governor of Bavaria Marcus Soder described bauma 2022 as providing "new perspectives and traditional stability" for the industry, and is the "emotional booster" of the global construction machinery industry.
Of course, in this era full of challenges, the returned bauma exhibition also shows the value of face to face talk and experience between "people" and "people and equipment".
This article is mainly compiled from the wonderful speech on the Bauma 2022 Innovation Forum. Through the cutting-edge views of the industry leaders participating in the exhibition, we can predict the future development of global construction machinery.
Future construction methods and materials
"Future construction methods and materials" is one of the five key themes of Bauma 2022. Luc Rudowski, innovation director of the Cement Technology Business Department of ThyssenKrupp Industrial Solutions, pointed out that reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the cement production process is one of the most critical challenges facing the cement industry. In view of this, Polysius, a cement related equipment manufacturing company under ThyssenKrupp, has developed the pure oxygen fuel technology, which is a pioneering process. It can increase the CO2 concentration in the kiln tail gas to 100% during the production of cement clinker, and the subsequently separated CO2 can be used or stored in industry.
The very promising technology in the future is the application of 3D printing technology in the field of architecture. On bauma 2022, Putzmeister showed the mobile and highly automated KARLOS 3D printer, and this "printer" looks like a familiar pump truck from the surface.
With KARLOS, concrete walls can be built in a short time without any traditional formwork and classic standard concrete. As a highly innovative combination of mobile concrete pumps and precision robotics, KARLOS allows rapid setup and highly automated wall creation at the construction site. This not only reduces the labor and safety risks at the construction site, but also is more efficient and time-saving compared with traditional construction methods. In addition, the use of standard concrete with a maximum particle size of 8mm (which can be supplied from traditional ready mixed concrete plants) can create greater cost-effectiveness in the manufacturing process.
In the speech at the bauma forum, Claudia Eugenin of the Catholic University of Chile put forward some innovative ideas on how to improve the sustainability of 3D printing of buildings. She proposed to integrate a large amount of waste generated by Chile's mining industry into 3D printed building materials. About a quarter of Chilean families live in poorly constructed buildings, and 3D printing can use a large amount of waste from the mining industry as building materials for these houses.
In the Bauma Innovation Award in 2022, Holcim GmbH (Germany) won the architectural award with its CPC (carbon prestressed concrete member), which is strengthened with prestressed carbon fiber instead of traditional steel. This process produces thin and high-performance concrete slabs, which can save 80% of materials and reduce the carbon footprint of building materials by 75%.
Integration of automation, intelligence and electrification, and extraordinary innovation in the field of "intelligent building equipment"
Fabio Carluccio, the decarburization director of the quarry of Holcim, the manufacturer of building materials, pointed out in the speech at the Bauma Forum that the autonomous and digital mining process has promoted the centralization of employee safety and operation supervision, while in the overall solution of the digital mine, there is a close relationship between the automatic driving solution, the use of small vehicles, and electric mining cards and other electric engineering machinery.
Large ore trucks, which play an important role in today's quarries, may be replaced by smaller autonomous electric trucks in the future. Smaller electric vehicles are more cost-effective, generate less dust and noise, and greatly reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Narrow roads can also be used in quarries.
Professor Martin Sobczyk of the Mechanical Engineering Research Institute of Freiberg Institute of Technology and Mining in Germany pointed out that automation and electrification are difficult to separate, and the production efficiency of the mining industry can be improved in a variety of ways: automation and autonomy, new traction design, especially the coupling and separation of traction and operation. The intelligent difficulty in mining operation lies in how to locate equipment without GPS or with very weak GPS signal and how to realize real-time data transmission. These two difficulties are also the key problems being tackled in the field of intelligent mine research and development in China.
Built Robotics launched the Exo system on bauma 2022, equipped with solid hardware and an eight level safety system, which can be used to convert any excavator into a fully autonomous trenching robot, calibrate it in less than a day, and conduct autonomous trenching in various types of soil, depths, and under various conditions.
As a leading artificial intelligence company in Germany, Psiori demonstrated on bauma its timber loading crane used in a paper mill in Florida, the United States, which has been upgraded to "Level 3 automatic driving". With the help of cameras, laser scanners, internal sensors and artificial intelligence developed by Psiori, 350 ton cranes can unload tree trunks from trucks efficiently and safely on their own, and can choose manual intervention.
Construction machinery 4.0, not only digitalization
The industry realized many years ago that data exchange independent of the platform is an important key to digitalization.
At the opening ceremony of bauma 2022, Volker Wissing, German Minister of Digital and Transport, announced that the German government would provide building information model (BIM) for federal government projects nationwide from 2025, which is a method to optimize cross lifecycle construction project management with the help of digital building information and software.
Therefore, construction machinery must meet the requirements of digital construction sites, not the opposite. One of the most critical points is that all construction machinery and equipment will need standardized interfaces, which is a major obstacle facing the industry. Construction companies should achieve end-to-end communication and further process machine and process data. In order to solve this problem, the German Mechanical Engineering Association (VDMA) and the Housing Development Agency established the "Construction Machinery 4.0 Working Group" in Bauma 2019. The goal is to develop a unified, cross manufacturer, mechanical independent, data compliant digital communication form for the entire construction process. At present, 105 members from seven countries have organized 30 working groups to study and solve key problems such as mechanical data, data method, system architecture and human-computer interface.
As part of the "Construction Machinery 4.0 Working Group", the "Auxiliary Equipment" cluster has achieved remarkable success in bauma 2022. In the past two years, the team has successfully developed an open and manufacturer independent data interface, which can be used to map all relevant use cases of communication between accessories and construction machinery, and can simplify the control of excavator accessories, such as buckets, grab clips and breaking hammers. Other commonly used operating components and displays are no longer needed. The new data interface can even use complex tools and equipment through "plug and play", that is, without complex conversion. This achievement won the honor of the "Digital" category of the Bauma Innovation Award in 2022.
Zero emission road
Eugen Schobesberger, Chairman of the Senior Technical Policy Advisory Group of the European Commission for Construction Equipment (CECE) and the technical director general manager of Liebherr EMtec, said that decarburization in the European construction equipment industry includes four pillars: optimized components to improve mechanical efficiency; Specially trained employees and independent solutions help improve work efficiency; Improve process efficiency by selecting the best machine or machine combination; Use alternative energy sources.
However, the decarburization process is hindered by the heterogeneity of construction machinery and equipment and the various operations they must perform. Manufacturers need a long time to develop, verify and industrialize appropriate solutions. Therefore, the layout must be started as early as possible to create the necessary frontier research and development ideas, otherwise, the future construction machinery will be difficult to meet the market demand for zero emission equipment.
John Smeets, technical director of leasing company Boels Real, introduced the role that construction machinery leasing enterprises can play in achieving zero emissions. Equipment lessors not only invest more and more in digital solutions such as remote information processing and fleet management, but also invest in green and low emission technologies. Under the background of Bauma 2022 engineering machinery electrification trend, John Smeets predicted that the demand for more accurate smart grid would rise. In view of the fluctuations in energy costs, grid capacity and the service time of single equipment, the key problem to be solved here will be to determine which equipment should be ideally charged at which time.
Charles B é nard, co-founder and managing director of Hiboo, a French IT supplier, said at the bauma forum: "If we cannot measure the current carbon emissions, we cannot optimize anything." Accurate measurement requires construction companies to collect and process large amounts of data from construction machinery manufacturers or remote information processing sources. The big data generated by the vast number of construction machinery and equipment is more important than ever before, which also forces construction machinery manufacturers and users to pay more attention to data and efficiency.
As for bauma 2022, after communicating with several senior people in the industry, the common feeling is that this session is not as lively as previous sessions, and it seems that innovation in the frontier fields of the global construction machinery industry is somewhat weak.
However, despite this, through this exhibition, we also saw some threads of future industry development. To a certain extent, we have seen some gaps between the domestic construction machinery industry and the world's best. Some achievements may not be useful just to talk about. More importantly, we should do it first.
May we create more interesting things and values for this "fragmented world" and "solid and tangible steel industry".
