Enhanced Safety: eFence
Have you or your operator experienced or witness a time where the excavator over-swung and almost knocked into something; or accidentally puncture a pipe or electrical cable?
All these might sound absurd or burshed off as a one-time carelessness, but they do pose potential safety risks to everyone around the moving excavator.
To overcome this safety hazard, Cat has designed a standard 2D eFence technology on some of their next generation excavators.
As the name says, it creates boundaries or eFence around your excavator, and prevents the excavator from crossing the "fence". There are a total of 5 working envelopes for the excavator.
e-Wall Floor: This is especially useful in Singapore where all our electrical cables and pipes are run underground. When you set the maximum depth to be dug, the excavator will automatically stop. No need to worry about overdigging and puncture anything (and get painful fines!)
e-Wall Swing: There are 2 places where you can use this feature. First is road side construction. Singapore is constantly doing many roadworks on existing roads. Though there are temporary safety barriers to segregate the construction area from the public space, the thought of it overswinging and crashing into the cars on the road is quite scary. Second is at job site with very tight spaces, like a tunnel or possibly indoors. With the e-Wall swing you can ensure that the machine is constantly kept within the left-right boundaries, no need to worry about damaging any thing to the left or right of the machine.
e-Wall Forward: This is useful in tight spaces. You can set the maximum forward stretch length of the boom & stick.
e-Wall Ceiling: This eWall ceiling feature is useful when the excavator is working in tunnels or places with overhead cables. Similiar to the e-Wall Forward, you can set the maximum lift height of the boom & stick. You do need to worry about damaging overhead structures in case the operator is slightly distracted.
e-Wall Cab Protection: As the picture below illustrates, the e-Wall Cab Protection protects the operator sitting in the cabin from over curling the bucket and accidentally injure himself. Though this may sound rare, but prevention is better than facing the aftermath of it.
The set up of these e-Wall boundaries are much easier than you would expect. We have illustrated the steps in the video below.
The Standard 2D eFence feature is available the following Excavator models: