“Fuel efficiency without operational efficiency has no meaning at all. The major business of road building is to build roads by consuming minimum possible fuel,” says Rajinder Raina, General Manager – Marketing, Escorts Construction Equipment.

 The Escorts Group is among India’s leading engineering conglomerates operating in the high growth sectors of construction and material handling equipment, railway equipment and auto components. It manufactures and markets a diverse range of construction and material handling equipment like cranes, loaders, vibratory rollers and forklifts. Today an increasing need of fuel efficient machines could easily be observed in road building equipment segment. In an e-mail response to B2B Purchase, Rajinder Raina explains the significance of less fuel consumption and talks about the solutions offered by Escorts CE as well.

In road building equipment segment, what are the new technologies you have developed to reduce fuel consumption?
Fuel comprises the major cause of operation in production machines. With increasing fuel prices the importance of fuel consumption has increased multifold. As we speak about the production machines, the best measure of monitoring fuel consumption is the amount of work done per unit of fuel consumed.

We, at Escorts, have been working up on getting the best output from the machine out of every litre of fuel consumed. Also, lesser the fuel consumed lesser the cost of lubricants. We are currently supplying machines with Bharat Stage III compliant engines on our entire range of vibratory compactors. A lot of work has been done on heat balance of the engines as these machines have to work in ambient temperatures going as high
as 45-47 C.

Up to what percentage of fuel savings the new models offer compared to the earlier versions?
It would be pertinent to state that fuel consumption in compactors has to be linked with the compaction results delivered by the machine. Escorts soil compactors and tandem vibratory compactors give a saving of 10-15 per cent on the fuel consumption for delivering specific compaction results as compared with the earlier variants.

Being fuel-efficient, is it possible to maintain operational efficiency also?
To start with, the term ‘fuel consumed per hour’ is highly misleading term in any production machine.

Fuel efficiency without operational efficiency has no meaning at all. The major business of road building is to build roads by consuming minimum possible fuel. Today the major deliverable of compactors is compaction which is measured against laid down norms and it is non-negotiable. For manufacturers, delivering operational efficiency is a given and fuel efficiency is the competitive differentiator. Therefore it is imperative that fuel efficiency cannot come at the cost of operational efficiency.

Please name your new fuel-efficient road building equipment and their capacities.
Escorts offers the widest range of road compaction equipment which are as follows with their maximum operating weight:

• • Soil vibratory rollers: EC 5250 – 10.3 tonnes and 2420 – 12.1 tonnes
  • Tandem vibratory rollers:  HD85 – 9.3 tonnes
  • Mini tandem vibratory roller: EC 3664 – 3.2 tonnes.

Improvement is a continuous process which is ongoing for all these machines. The compactors have to deliver through exceeding the job requirements and customer expectations. Escorts has its ears to the ground, particularly keeping in view the fact that there will be an increasing demand for road compaction equipment in near future.