Ensuring a plentiful supply of lime, as well as avoiding flat tyres, Vodafone and Continental have joined together to guarantee the Oetelshofen quarry, in Wuppertal, have the right tyres for the job. With the perfect tyre pressure, Schlüter Baumaschinen GmbH will always have smooth and trouble-free mining operations.
Digital Mobility an Essential Part of Everyday Life at the Oetelshofen Quarry
Michael Reinartz, head of innovation at Vodafone Germany explained how the partnership gets involved. "Today’s mobility is connected and digital. It enables us to create greater safety and efficiency on the roads, as well as at industrial sites and extraordinary workplaces, such as the lime quarry in Oetelshofen. This requires fast networks that transmit data safely and quickly. Digital mobility is already part of everyday life at the Oetelshofen quarry. Together with Continental, we are creating the greatest possible safety for drivers and enabling an efficient and smooth process flow thanks to digital tyre management."
With more than 1.3 million metric tons of lime mined annually, the seven 40-ton dump trucks take the fully excavated buckets at walking speed to haul away the mined stones. With these giant machines so crucial to operations, the dump truck tyres must always have air in the tyres to keep operations flooding. If one of the machines fails, this too costs time and money. Up to several tens of thousands of euros daily. This is why Schlüter Baumaschinen GmbH is using Continental’s digital tyre management. It sends out early warning messages before tyre damage could even occur, thereby offering the greatest possible safety for employees and machines as well as efficiency for process flows.
How Continental's TPMS Helps Schlüter Baumaschinen GmbH
With the ContiConnect digital tyre monitoring system, a sensor installed in the tyres continuously monitors the tyre pressure and temperature. The data is sent every two minutes via mobile communications to selected recipients such as the driver and head office staff, as well as to a central web portal. This way, the driver always has an overview of the condition of the tyres.
In critical situations, ContiConnect automatically sends a warning message – to the display of the driver’s cab, to the web portal, or via text message and email to defined recipients. The tyre data is securely protected and reliably sent to the Continental cloud using the Vodafone data card and from there to the ContiConnect web portal. This gives fleet managers in the quarry and service partners such as Schlüter an overview of the tyres of the entire fleet at all times. Using digital tyre management thus prevents expensive tyre failures in heavy and large vehicles (dump trucks).
"Continental has continuously refined its digital tyre monitoring system. Continental has been supplying its radial ply tyres for heavy earth-moving vehicles with digital sensors ex-works since 2016. Today’s ContiConnect enables tyre monitoring of vehicle fleets continuously and location-independent. This means that the tyre pressure is constantly maintained at the correct level, thereby saving fuel. Thanks to continuous tyre monitoring, the tyres also have a longer service life. Tyre maintenance work can be carried out proactively, in the form of predictive maintenance, thus avoiding idle times,” says Reinhard Klant, an expert in earth movement and product line manager at Continental Commercial Speciality Tyres.
The fast and secure data transfer, even in remote places such as quarries and construction sites, secures lime extraction and makes digital tyre management a pioneering system for raw material extraction.
