Ready to rock: Volvo CE for Asia’s quarries
As cities across Asia become ever taller, wider and deeper, increasing urbanization is driving demand for aggregates and other building materials. Gathering these materials calls for highly efficient and reliable machinery to meet the demanding conditions of quarries that may extend more than half a kilometer below ground.
Asia is home to the world’s largest aggregates producers, and with several countries in the grip of a construction boom, the area is set to dominate the market over the next five years pushing CAGR to more than 6%. One of the biggest markets is South Korea, which produces almost a quarter of a billion tonnes of aggregates from its 500 or so quarries each year. It’s also renowned for its stringent quality regulations, so it’s not surprising that many companies in the segment turn to Volvo CE.
Myung Jin Industrial, for instance, runs a team of three Volvo EC480D hydraulic excavators to meet the rising demand for crushed stone. Working 10-hour shifts for 28 days per month, these dependable workhorses consistently handle up to 3500 m3 of stone products daily (1 million m3 annually) at its large quarry in Chungju, Chungbuk.
Seeing the light
A quarry can be most simply defined as ‘a mine without a roof’, and it relies on a range of equipment to support its processes from site preparation through to intensive operation. Once the target materials are exposed in a quarry these can be extracted and moved using a variety of excavation, loading and hauling equipment. With the wide open spaces a quarry affords, greater volumes of material can be moved each hour to keep pace with rising demand.
For instance, the huge 7 m3 capacity bucket of the Volvo EC950F excavator can fill the 55 tonne Volvo A60H articulated hauler in just four passes, at an average cycle time of just 20-25 seconds. It even makes light work of loading the huge Volvo R100 rigid hauler that boasts around twice the capacity of a typical underground truck. From here materials are transferred to a crusher/screener to produce aggregate. This is where Volvo CE’s wheel loaders take over. The cavernous 7 m3 bucket of the L220H wheel loader, for instance, is a great choice for loading stockpiles of aggregates.
Beyond the production processes, Volvo CE machines can be found in other areas of the quarry. For example Volvo CE motor graders and soil compactors are used to construct access roads while the range of compact excavators or skid-steer loaders can be used for the digging of drainage trenches. Small articulated haulers feature in site preparation or overburden removal, while medium wheel loaders are useful tools for maintenance and repair, or material handling.
Keep it up
Of course, in a tough, dusty work environment, machine uptime and availability are critical. Quarry operators also want to know they’ll get consistent performance without too many interruptions and that’s exactly what Volvo CE delivers. For example, Myung Jin’s Volvo EC480D excavators can operate for 2000 hours before their hydraulic oil return filters need swapping out. Their powerful D13 engines can continue to reliably deliver 261 kW thanks to a 3-stage air cleaner and optional oil-bath pre-cleaner that provides an additional barrier to the entry of dirt, while a unique oil cooler separated from both engine and radiator provides easier cleaning and servicing in addition to superior cooling capacity.
Volvo CE’s range of Customer Support Agreements extend this uptime even further, offering preventive maintenance, total repairs or a 24-hour parts delivery guarantee, as well as a number of services that use the latest technology for machine monitoring. CareTrack, Oil Analysis and MATRIS can all be used to monitor machine status, providing owners with vital early indications of a potential fault and helping prevent problems from escalating by enabling timely intervention.
Whether producing marble slabs, sand or copper ore, quarrying is one of the most demanding applications for any machine. With the support of Volvo CE, it becomes that little bit easier!