What would be an average fuel consumption per distance (not time) for some articulated haulers? The reason I'm asking is because I'm working on a school project where I want to estimate fuel consumption for mass hauling in road construction projects and while I've found some numbers on fuel consumption per hour I've not found it per distance which is what I would need. So to anyone out there who might have some info this, let me know what the fuel consumption is per distance unit. Also let me know what type of articulated hauler it is and what driving conditions the fuel consumption is based on! If you have a source for that info I'd also like to see it.
Unfortunately there are no such numbers, you have to calculate them. Generally speaking the way earthmoving estimating is done on the basis of tonnes moved/hr and fuel consumed/hr. That way you can arrive at a cost/tonne for fuel, which is the way pretty much all major earthmoving jobs are bid these days. Obviously all sorts of other costs for the equipment are applied as well, but you are asking specifically about fuel. The first thing you need to know how much material is to be moved. If you know the payload capacity of your truck in tonnes you can estimate how many truck loads it will take to move the material. if you are time constrained you figure out how many truck loads you need to move the material in the allotted time. If you are limited only to a certain number of trucks you divide the total tonnes by the payoad to figure out how many truck cycles you need to move your "X" tonnes of material. Now you come to how far the material has to be moved (considering all factors such as one-way distance because loaded and empty travel time will be different, any gradients, and the rolling resistance of the surface on which the truck will run). Once that is established you can come up with an estimate of the empty & loaded cycle times that will be added together to form 1 complete truck cycle. Then you need to estimate the "duty cycle" the trucks will be on. This is usually classed as Low, Medium, or High. I would say bulk earthmoving on a road construction proejct on basically unmade and probably poorly-maintained dirt roads will be either Medium or High Duty Cycle, especially if the loader operators have a tencdency to overload. Figures are available for ranges of fuel consumption per hour based on L, M, & H Duty Cycle. PM me with an e-mail address. I'll ship you a load of estimating information supplied by a major earthmoving manufacturer who shall remain nameles, but let's call it Cat for the sake of argument. That will give you a good starting point.
Thanks for the info. What you say makes sense because all the info I've found about articulated haulers have been about fuel consumption per hour. However, I apparently need to make 3 posts in total before I'm allowed to send a PM, so with my next message I'll PM you with an e-mail address
Infact, I might have to consider the option of accounting for the fuel consumption per hour. Though the problem with that is that I will only have info about the masses and transportation distances along the road line, so either way it's going to require some work and thought process to get reasonably accurate numbers. But alright, I'm going to PM you now since this is my third post in the forums!
You have e-mail - a reply to your PM .............!!
On the newer Cat equipment you can download a status report. On the 740 it will show how many hours, how many miles and in what gear, the fuel consumption, load count ( calculated by how many times the bed is raised) plus many many more details. This would be more than enough info to calculate what you need.
Thanks Nige for all the help and input on my calculations! Lee-online: Thats definitely interesting, do you know where I could find some of these status reports?
The Product Status Report is downloaded from a specific machine using the Cat Electronic Technician interface. it's a shame we don't have any articulated trucks here or I could download one and e-mail it to you
I'll see what we have at work. I know we had some 740B but they are new and haven't been used yet.
I have run articulated haulers for many years now. We always track fuel consumption in gallons per hour, but have to factor in a load factor, or duty cycle, depending on the job conditions. On the same trucks, I have seen anything from 3 gallons to 9 gallons, depending on conditions. The highest is long hauls with high rolling resistance on the roads, like in sand, and the lowest is short trips with much time spent waiting to get loaded. A recent project with a haul that got longer by the day, and ended at just short of 2 miles, in a sandy riverbottom, was in the 9 gallon range, and trucks were making about 6.5 round trips per hour at best, so figure they were getting about 2.5 miles per gallon, give or take. I rounded the numbers off for discussion purposes. This was with 35 ton trucks. If fuel is a big deal, I think you should break it down into ton miles per gallon, to take into account the difference in effeciency of various sized trucks. A larger truck may burn more fuel per load, hour, mile, or however you want to measure it, but still move more material per gallon of fuel burned, and that is the best bet.