The Wirtgen Group machines are designed to fully comply even with strict safety regulations.

Ramesh Palagiri, Managing Director & CEO, Wirtgen India

How does your company define and measure the efficiency of your road construction equipment?

The Wirtgen Group has been continuously innovating its products and all our road technology brands – Wirtgen, Voegele and Hamm are not only global market leaders but also innovation leaders. The Wirtgen Group has been consistently developing products which offer better efficiency in terms of fuel consumption and this helps in sustainable development and less carbon emissions, lower life cycle costs and better productivity of these machines.

What specific features or design elements of your equipment contributes to its overall efficiency?

The WIRTGEN Group machines are designed to fully comply even with strict safety regulations. The operation in the machines is self-explanatory and does not require any special language skills. The innovative and easy-to-learn ErgoBasic operating system is every ma-chine operator’s dream, providing ergonomic working conditions tailored to real-life use.

What technological advancements or innovations have you incorporated into your equipment to enhance efficiency?

To start with we have introduced the Cold Milling and Cold Recycling and these two technologies are reasonably well accepted in the market. Soil stabilization is also becoming very popular and all these technologies result in saving resources, faster construction and cost economical solutions.  The Cement Treated Base or subbase (CTB or CTSB) not only reduces aggregate requirement, but also ensures stronger foundation and reduces layers. The cold recycling reuses 100% of asphalt pavement material and only addition is bitumen 2-3% which rehabilitates the asphalt pavement to its original properties.

For Concrete paving, the Wirtgen Slipform Pavers can now offer Dual- layer concrete paving, where a single machine is used for dual layer concrete paving, the bottom layer and the top layer concrete are paved in a synchronized operation. It is additionally ensured that both the top and bottom layers are paved “Wet-in-Wet” regardless of weather or site conditions. This can be done with single paver or with two pavers where it is necessary to distribute the operating weight to two separate machines.

In Asphalt paving – the VOGELE -In Line Paving where the binder and surface courses are paved “hot on hot” in a single pass, greatly accelerating activities on a job site. In addition, it is not necessary to completely close down the road: the three machines – a paver for the binder course, a paver for the surface course and a material feeder – work “in line”, one behind the other, leaving one lane open to traffic. An ideal solution for rehabilitation of heavily travelled roads. The process is both economical and highly eco-friendly, the layer thickness can be reduced in “hot on hot” paving, thus lowering consumption of the costly surface course mix.

VÖGELE also offers an innovative and economical solution for the road construction sector with the non-contacting Road Scan temperature measurement system. The scanning and documentation of the freshly paved asphalt’s temperature is already specified in tenders in several markets, and in others there are definitive plans to implement this. After completion of the construction job, contractors can furnish detailed evidence that the temperature was maintained within the correct range using the recorded GPS data, including precise tracking.

How do you collaborate with customers or industry professionals to gather feedback on the efficiency of your equipment?

At Wirtgen Group, we continuously upgrade our products by understanding the customer needs and the valuable feedback and suggestions received from our customers, we try to incorporate within our new products. These machines also obviously undergo a lot of testing in different conditions and even with our existing customers before they are launched in the market. The average age of any of the Wirtgen Group products in the market is around 3 years, which means that most of our products are from the new generation and in most cases, the Wirtgen Group products are at least a generation ahead of Competition.

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