Nozzle knowledge

A new machine in the UAE is set to revolutionise how we think about trenching and utility ditching.

Anyone who knows about trenching will tell you of the condition known as ‘backhoe fade’ This occurs typically when the bucket on a small excavator gets put through a utility pipe and the suddenly it is ‘pffzt’ and lights out for everybody in the street.

Not only can disrupting a gas, water or electricity pipe be dangerous, but it can obviously be extremely expensive. ‘We had a fibre-optic cable that was broken by a backhoe recently’ said Joe Chappell, operations director of Action Int. Services.

Well, that is where a new ‘suction excavator’ comes in. Using a pair of enormous fans powered from the truck’s hydraulic system, the machine is capeable of moving an enourmous volume of air.

To be slightly more technical, the suction excavator uses air as the transport agent. In order to make this physically possible, the air volume must be greater than the material volume to suck.

If it is, than the machine can suck almost anything, like one of those wet and dry vacuum cleaners that you sometimes find in workshops. Because it doesn’t work like a pump, it doesn’t need a constant flow of material to work.

This means that it is an extremely versatile machine, suited to a wide variety of tasks beyond that of a simple sludge sucker. “The key to the machine is that it only sucks up what is loose and there is no mechanical action into the soil, so it won’t break anything. So if you have a fiber optic cable or a pipe you can just literally lift everything around it and keep it in place” Chappell explained.

Any site manager who has had to deal with a shovel going through a fiber optic will know that it is not a simple matter of twisting the ends back together – serious cost is involved. “It costs AED 36,000 to repair – even though it was a ten minute job” he added.

Cables

This new comer won’t damage cables, but we were skeptical about using it as an excavator. These worries were relieved when we saw the machine working on some solid ground.

The great nozzle snorted up unbroken soil to a depth of about a meter. The time? About a minute. It was reasonably quiet in use as well. Certainly, you wouldn’t want one as a next door neighbour, but in operation it was quieter than all but the very smallest excavators.

The boom is controlled by remote, just like a modern conrete pump, and having a built in bin meant that there was no dusty excavation pile. In fact, there was no dust coming out of the machines extractions at all, which struck us as odd. “You won’t get a plume of dust with this machine because of the high filtration, basically the air is on top” Chappell explained.

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