Virtual Off Road Machine

The European and US non-road machine market is an inherently complex market due to the huge diversity of machine types for construction, mining, agriculture, forestry and materials handling. The market has sales of 700,000 machines, is worth £37bn/year and is growing at between 4 and 30%/year depending on market segment. This is also a sector where the UK has a very strong global position, employing 58,000 people, with an 85% export ratio. As each type of machine has a unique combination of market drivers and customer needs there is a requirement for a specific optimisation for each type of machine that adds complexity to this market. This market faced a severe step change due to exhaust emissions legislation from 2011 when machines were required to meet
stringent limits which demanded >90% reductions in NOx and Particulate (PM) emissions over current levels. This is all driving an unprecedented increase in vehicle systems complexity. Building and validating the thousands of variants of CAT machines using traditional approaches based on prototype testing is economically unattractive. The team proposed a new approach for this market that built on existing expertise, where the majority of systems validation has been done in a virtual environment. In order to achieve this, the consortium lead by CAT, has developed and validated a virtual non-road machine modelling tool and built representative non-road machines in order to validate the modelling tool and provide technology demonstrators of the optimised systems.