Boom Suspension for Wheel Loaders
Over the past years, the driving speeds of construction vehicles have steadily risen. Even the small and medium sized machines for material handling and transport (e. g. wheel loaders and telescopic loaders) have followed this trend. Today, speeds of over 30 km/h are reached when driving on roads.
If a wheel loader drives over a bump, the resulting shock is transferred from the tire to the chassis, setting the mass of the boom with attachment in motion. This results in dangerous boom oscillation that can negatively affect the driving comfort, the safety and thus the handling performance of the machine. Due to the constructional design and the weight sharing of a wheel loader, damping should ideally take place at the cylinders between the boom and the base vehicle to reduce the effect of the introduced pulse so that the resulting pitching motion of the vehicle remains in the controllable area of the driver.
In addition, transport goods may be hurled out of the bucket due to strake and jerky movements of the mast.
Spatially optimized systems
For unsprung mobile working machines, ARGO-HYTOS offers boom suspension systems in different designs and feature combinations. All they have in common is the fact, that the movement of the bucket or boom is decoupled from the vehicle through hydraulic accumulators. Pipe rupture protection and constant accumulator pre-charging can be integrated just as accumulator safety valves and drain valves. The individual functional modules can be combined to a specific control block and easily be integrated into existing hydraulic systems. The installation can be designed both for series production as well as for retrofitting. In most cases, no changes must be made to the existing hydraulic circuits. From simple adding of accumulators over systems with adaptive accumulator pre-charging up to fully integrated systems with pipe rupture protection, anti-cavitation, load-dependent damping and accumulator charging, we can design – together with the customer – the special control block out of individual functional modules which spatially optimized fits into the machine and comprehensively meets the requirements of the customers and the legislature.
Uncomplicated conversion or retrofitting
As the control block contains all necessary functions, mobile machines can be upgraded or retrofitted quickly and easily. There is no need to readjust the transport position of the bucket or the boom. With the ARGO-HYTOS boom suspension system, the loss of carrying height when driving on roads is a thing of the past, because the manifold does not create additional internal leaks. All that is needed to activate the damping, is an electrical signal, generated depending on the speed or the operator.
"Total Cost of Ownership“
The new ARGO-HYTOS boom suspension system features simple integration and ensures increased material handling performance, driving comfort and safety. And, since there is less wear on the machine material, the boom suspension systems also contribute to the longevity of the machine and thus help to minimize the “total cost of ownership”.