The Wirtgen Group has been consistently developing products which offer better fuel efficiency.
Ramesh Palagiri
MD and CEO, Wirtgen India
How do you view the current market scenario in Indian construction industry?
Due to elections, this year has been a moderate growth for road construction industry. With slow start in FY24, five more states in India will undergo election in next 10 months. Project award is only 95 km in Q1 FY24 as against 611 km in the same period in FY23. Road construction slowed down to 1,934 km compared to 2,250 km during the same period last year.
How are your latest products and solutions making an impact in the Indian construction industry?
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 are you innovating your product lines to meet the emerging needs of efficiency and sustainability?
The Wirtgen Group has been continuously innovating its products and all our road technology brands – Wirtgen, VÖGELE 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.
The Wirtgen Group is a pioneer in the realization of greater mobility in road construction. And, in this process, sustainability is a mainstay of the group’s corporate strategy. As a part of the John Deere Construction and Forestry Division, the sustainability goals of the Wirtgen Group make a valuable contribution to the overall strategy. For instance, a significant reduction of the emissions of transporting and operating machines and the overall activities at the group’s production facilities and sites is expected by 2030. At the same time, the Wirtgen Group anticipates a continuous increase in the number of sustainable machine and technology solutions by 2026.
What is your Mission 2025 for the company?
The Wirtgen Group supports and assists its customers in fast and cost-efficient ways, with the realization of the world’s continuously growing demands for infrastructure and the fulfilment of specific criteria relating to environmental protection and the safety of humanity and nature. These include solutions not only for individual machines and their engine and drive train technologies, but also for complete production systems in the road construction sector.
The company’s holistic approach to the entire road construction process chain promises the most effective understanding of the greatest ecological and economic potentials.
Alongside machine efficiency and alternative applications and methods, digitization and connected system solutions are important drivers in the development of the overall road construction process chain. The Wirtgen Group has developed application-specific core technologies as well as digital solutions and technologies of tomorrow that which are already available for our customers. Our vision always has been to stay CLOSE TO OUR CUSTOMERS.
