bulk material volumes.
Load-scanning technologies positioned to deliver a more accurate profile of materials producers make.
A load of sand arrives to the construction site. As Carey West and his colleagues observe the load, they realize it’s smaller than the 80 cu. yd. they were expecting.
“We were buying quite a lot of sand from a company charging 80 cu. yd. per truck,” says West, referring to experiences he had while working for his father’s New Zealand construction company nearly 20 years ago. “We put the load on the ground and were like, ‘That’s not 80 cu. yd.’”
West and his colleagues manually measured the piles delivered to determine their volumes. Based on measurements, they concluded the sand supplier was shorting them.
“The truck driver would say, ‘You’ve walked all over the sand, you’ve compressed it down,’” West says.
West and his father disagreed. They felt their supplier was taking advantage of them.
In related instances, West says his family’s construction company was shorted because sand they ordered got stuck in the back of the supplier’s truck when unloading. That was unacceptable, he says.
“A truck would carry 10 cu. yd., and 1.5 cu. yd. would get stuck in the truck,” West says. “It’s an inefficiency.”
Because such incidents continuously occurred, West and his father sought to eliminate them and develop a system that could accurately capture material volumes. They started the process of developing such a system in 1998, exploring the idea with a few engineers.
load scanner, unlike the weigh scale procedure.
“We found a guy who’s still with me today,” says West, who formed LoadScan Ltd., his current company, in 2012. “He developed a system with a couple of variations with cameras. Within nine months, we were scanning trucks.”
The original product West and his team developed was a load scanner, which is a non-contact, drive-through tool designed to measure bulk material volumes. As a vehicle drives under a scanner, the load volume is scanned and a 3-D model is produced.
By comparing the profile generated with one stored for the same vehicle when empty, the scanner can calculate the load volume to within 1 percent, West says. And, if required, a load’s weight can be estimated by converting the load volume using the bulk density of the load material. The weight calculation can be done using software.
The technology is positioned to change how producers and users measure materials. He says it provides both parties with accurate material volume metrics in a matter of seconds.
“A lot of people see us competing with weigh bridges and scales,” West says. “We’re focused on volume, and what you get out of volumes and scanning is density. When densities change, you’re ripping off customers or getting ripped off. My dad didn’t want to be ripped off. He wanted it to be fair, because why should someone else benefit if it rained?”
Opportunity exploration
The question regarding rain is a fair one. Rain particularly affects weights for those handling organic materials, West says. Composters, for example, are affected because their product is capable of retaining significant amounts of moisture.
Say, for example, 1 cu. yd. of dry mulch weighs 400 lbs. West says the presence of moisture will inflate the weight significantly.
“If it weighs more, a customer is going to get less on a truck,” he says.
Composting is one area where LoadScan has made inroads in the United States. Walz Scale, another company that offers a load scanner, sees potential for its technology in that market, as well as in debris monitoring.
“You’ve got hurricanes and tornadoes,” says Matt Walz, vice president of Walz Scale. “FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) goes in there, and they pay by the amount of material in the back of the truck when cleaning up an area.”
shows a fully-loaded semitruck. The graphs at right are other indicators
of the truck’s load.
According to Walz, FEMA currently eyeballs how much material is in a truck bed and pays based on its rapid estimate.
“Load scanning is a new technology to create better value for those coming out of disaster areas,” Walz says.
Walz also sees potential for load scanning in the aggregates and construction industries.
“For quarries, one of the places I see this providing benefits is production monitoring coming out of the face,” Walz says. “A lot of producers will stockpile material, but they don’t have a good grasp of how much material they’re pulling out of the face and putting into the stockpile.”
Aggregate producers can pre-program their scanners to calculate weights and volumes of materials in trucks, Walz adds. A Walz Scale project with a customer using load scanners in tandem with Caterpillar 775 off-highway trucks offered some insights into how producers can improve, Walz says.
“We determined from the use of the scanner and some scales that their blast fragmentation was not very good,” he says. “Trucks would be 10 tons light, but they were maxed out in volume. That tells us we have rocks that are too big and there are a lot of voids in the back of the truck.”
Walz adds that truck scales offer users value but that they are more maintenance intensive than load scanners.
“They’re on the ground and they’re very susceptible to damage,” he says.
Scanners, on the other hand, are mounted above trucks on a pole – out of harm’s way, Walz says.
“The other good thing with scanners versus scales is you have to stop the vehicle to weigh it,” he says. “To scan it, you put it on the haul road. You don’t change anything about your operation. It’s as if nothing changes.”
Still, West says aggregate producers are tough to persuade because they’re accustomed to producing and selling in tons.
“They like talking in tons,” West says. “They don’t care about the volume with the respect that they’re legal on the road.”
But just because aggregate producers prefer to operate in tons doesn’t mean the technology doesn’t apply. They’re simply a tougher sell, West says.
“One way we want to target the aggregates industry is by working on that efficiency of production,” he says. “What are they actually producing? We want to get them the volumes they require.”
Business-changing tool
Volume is central to Clayton Leonard’s business. Leonard, president of New Earth Inc., a soil and compost producer in San Antonio, transitioned to load scanners about five years ago. He says the technology has changed his business.
“Now we know exactly how much we’re shipping, and it’s helped our operators get more refined on their accuracy knowing what 30 cu. yd. look like,” says Leonard, who discovered LoadScan back in 2010. “We scan everything coming in the door, too.”
New Earth purchases a variety of raw material sands, Leonard adds, so the technology has also shaped his buying practices.
“It allows us to judge our vendors,” he says. “Some would have wetter material coming in and the bulk densities are higher. It would drive me to the drier vendors.”
The data also give Leonard the opportunity to shore up costs.
“Say we have a recipe and it involves blending five different things together,” he says. “The scanners show us how much volume we end up with to more accurately determine our costs.”
And because Leonard more precisely knows how much material he’s adding to a blend, he can more accurately price material.
“Information is power,” he says. “As long as we have good, consistent data, we can use that to our advantage to drive either operational procedural changes or maybe even product changes. Or, it tells us we’re doing good in one area and let’s keep going.”
The scanners are a quantity control tool, as well.
“We would routinely have customers who would claim they were short,” Leonard says. “They would claim shortages, and we informed them all that we have these [scanners] now. You can’t necessarily bill off them in the states, but we keep a record of every load that scans for three to four months.”
Eventually, Leonard believes his industry will largely shift to load scanners.
“As we educate our customers, they’re going to demand this more,” Leonard says. “I see the competition probably short shipping a lot. Billing for 100 [cu. yd.] and shipping 80.”
Another measurement tool
LoadScan’s load volume scanner isn’t the only volumetric measuring tool in which New Earth’s Clayton Leonard has recently invested. Leonard also purchased an eBee drone with the goal of eliminating physical inventories.
”We’ve been watching drone technology for several years,” Leonard says. “The technology has finally come along.”
According to Leonard, New Earth flies its eBee once a month to take inventories. The drone takes hundreds of photographs, he says, and creates a 3-D image based on the collection of photos. The data is then exported into software, providing New Earth with volumes for every pile that are accurate to within 5 centimeters, according to Leonard.
New Earth has been taking monthly inventories, Leonard adds, but he intends to use the drone once a week going forward.
We can carry the drone around and use it between multiple facilities,” Leonard says. “It’s expensive, but it’s not that expensive when you look at potential savings.”