Komatsu - Digging into a big growth market

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With the help of multi-domain simulation to shorten development time, Komatsu strengthens its dominant position in the up-and-coming greater Asian earthmoving and construction equipment market – soon to be biggest segment in the world.

With countries around the world cutting back on building and infrastructure projects during the global economic recession, earthmoving and construction equipment manufacturers have been hit hard with nose-diving sales. Companies in Europe and North America were especially impacted, with markets there predicted to improve only at a measured pace that could take years to fully them pull out of the slump. Construction output in such developed countries is reported to have plummeted 480 billion euro annually since 2007.

Poised for global growth

Meanwhile, construction demand in up-and-coming nations is poised for significant growth in the coming years. According to data from industry analysts at Global Construction Perspectives and Oxford Economics, over the next ten years emerging nations – particularly in Asia – will dominate construction output and more than double their share of the global market estimated to reach 9.5 trillion euro by 2020. Fueling this growth are significantly increasing demands in these countries to modernize and expand transportation and utility infrastructure, build and upgrade industrial facilities and urbanization of growing populations. In particular, forecasts show China will overtake the US as the largest construction market by 2018 followed by India, with growth there expected to accelerate even faster than China.

This shift in the global construction landscape is good news for Komatsu Ltd. The Tokyo-based company is the second largest manufacturer of earthmoving and construction equipment in the world and dominates the market in the greater Asian region

that includes China, India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and former Soviet republics such as Russia. These countries top the list of sales regions for Komatsu, and their corporate strategy for increasing revenue growth is to further enhance their market position in greater Asia

Recognizing that rival companies are undoubtedly eyeing greater Asia as a lucrative market, Komatsu’s mid-term and long-range plans place high importance on launching new products before competitors. A key part of this effort is shortening development lead times by streamlining design processes, most particularly in applying some of the latest simulation technology. The goal: refine and optimize designs early in development to reduce the number of time-consuming build-and-test hardware prototype cycles later in the cycle.

Increasing engineering efficiency

Case in point was an initiative to increase engineering efficiency at Komatsu’s Construction Equipment Technical Center 1 (CETC1) Development Division in Osaka, Japan, by migrating from an older in-house Dynamic System Simulation (DSS) equation-solving code used since the 1980s to calculate the behavior of hydraulic and mechanical systems. With this software, models were created and modified in a tedious and time-consuming process of entering long strings of individual values and commands for each component and assembly. Users had to undergo extensive training, troubleshooting problems was difficult, and software maintenance was a drain on staff resources.

Multi-domain simulation model of the hydraulic system was created in building-block fashion with interconnected elements representing the oil cooler and other components including valves, hoses, an input lever and hydraulic motor pressure actuators.

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After an exhaustive search, Komatsu replaced DSS with an integrated commercial software tool: LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim 1D simulation software for predicting the performance of multi-domain intelligent systems. The software was selected for its speed and efficiency in allowing engineers to graphically create a unified physics-based model of mechanical, hydraulic, electrical, and thermal elements as well as control logic.

“LMS Imagine.Lab has extensive libraries of pre-defined elements that our engineers simply drag, drop and link together like building blocks. The working sketch displayed on the screen shows the relationship of all these elements to quickly predict the real-world behavior of the equipment,” explained Mr. Masahiro Koike, Chief Engineer with the CAD/CAM Group at CETC1. “The graphical software is intuitive, easy to use and requires minimal training before users are proficient.”

Fixing problems up front

According to Mr. Koike, 60 engineers at the technical center are trained on the new software to evaluate product behavior early in the development cycle. Problems are identified and corrected up front in the process, and a built-in optimization tool allows equipment performance to be refined before prototypes are built and tested.

“Efficiency early in design pays off tremendously at the end of development by reducing the number of prototype test cycles and the duration of each test.” “In many cases only a single hardware prototype may be needed instead of the ten or more that may have been formerly required. In some cases, prototype test time has been reduced as much as 90%,” explained Mr. Koike.

Simulation in action

Komatsu used up-front simulation recently in predicting the peak pressure of an oil cooler that dissipates heat in the hydraulic oil of a crawler excavator. The aluminum unit must withstand high hydraulic pressures from a small-diameter pump cylinder without pipes being over-designed with excess material. The aluminum pipes connecting the hydraulic motor to the cooler’s radiator core are particularly susceptible to

breakage under high pressures and fatigue loading from operational vibrations.

First, the entire hydraulic system was modeled, with interconnected elements representing the oil cooler and other components including valves, hoses, an input lever and hydraulic motor pressure actuators. A simulation was then performed to predict pressure at the oil cooler inlet pipe during the complete pumping cycle for three different pipe diameters. These calculated values closely matched actual measurements of pressure and timing, thus validating the fidelity of the simulation model.

Engineers then could use the simulation model in optimizing the diameter and thickness of inlet pipes for achieving a lower-cost, lightweight hydraulics system design for the equipment under study as well as other series of excavators. With the design optimized early in development, the new excavator design was verified using only a single prototype instead of engineers having to adjust pipe diameter and thickness on multiple physical mockups.

In another analysis, up-front simulation was used in accurately calculating excavator bucket handling; specifically, the maximum reach in extending and retracting the bucket while keeping the same above-ground height by simultaneous operation of the boom and arm levers. In this way, engineers were able to accurately determine maximum bucket reach – a critical handling parameter demanded by customers and a major factor in buyers’ purchase decision.

Bumping up the bottom line

“We use up-front multi-domain simulation in a wide range of applications including highly accurate prediction of dynamic performance characteristics, fuel economy and weight reduction for excavators, wheel loaders, stone crushers and other construction and earthmoving equipment,” explained Mr. Koike. “Refining designs and accurately determining these important parameters early in design enables Komatsu to develop world-class construction and earthmoving equipment designs and further strengthen our competitive position in the greater Asian and global markets.”

Komatsu is a world leader in construction and earthmoving equipment including a wide range of hydraulic crawler excavators, wheel loaders and crawler dozers.

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