Electrification： SANY’s latest awakening

In 2020, SANY and CATL signed a strategic partnership agreement to cooperate in the field of new energy, aiming to further promote the development of electrification in the construction machinery industry, taking it to new levels.

CATL is a company specialized in developing innovative new energy technologies in China, providing solutions and services for new energy applications worldwide.

According to the agreement, both parties will expedite their joint development of new energy products in concrete machinery, mining machinery, cranes, port machinery, excavators and heavy trucks, alongside new big data-based technologies such as battery behavior tracking and fault self-diagnosis.

Previous to the signing of this agreement, SANY and CATL had already deployed China’s first batch of purely electric port tractors at Port of Xiamen，a city on China’s southeastern coast, aiming to forge a smarter and greener port. Other co-developed equipment, including an electric truck mixer and an electric muck truck, have been put into large-scale application in many areas in China.

For CATL, this agreement would expand their power cell technology into a new sector, the heavy machinery industry. Yet to the heavy machinery industry, this new technology signals the unfolding of the next wave of the latest industrial revolution.

This wave has swept across SANY’s entire product range.

The excavator is one of SANY’s primary businesses, accounting for more than one-third (5.88 billion USD) of SANY’s sales revenue in 2020. In June 2021, the latest model SY375IDS was launched. This medium-sized excavator comes with new features such as smart weighing, enabling real-time monitoring of the weight of the bucket contents, and digital operational floor and ceiling limits, setting operation height limits in advance to avoid damage to or from underground pipelines and overhead high-voltage lines due to misoperation. In addition, data generated during operation is collected and analyzed to portray the user’s habits and common working conditions encountered, to which the main pump’s output can be adjusted accordingly for a suitable and optimal fuel usage setting. Through a posture-sensing system and a PID closed-loop control on the bucket, many movement commands are integrated into one button, further simplifying operation.

Statistics show that when using all these functions, the SY375IDS standard operation time per cycle was reduced to 12 seconds, which is 33% faster than manual operation.

The call for an electrical era is widely echoed across the industry.

In late May of this year, with the theme of “The New Smarter Generation of Construction Machinery”, Changsha International Construction Equipment Exhibition (CICEE) was held in Changsha, where 10% of the showcased equipment featured the latest electrical or unmanned technologies. Xiang Wenbo, CEO of SANY Group, said at the closing ceremony on May 31st that electrification and autonomy is the trend across the entire industry.

The overall trend of electrification in the construction equipment industry was triggered by the increasing maturity and affordability of necessary technologies, as well as the increasingly strict emissions regulations. In addition to the aforementioned advantages, what electrification can offer goes far beyond environmental friendliness. Electrical technologies lay the technical foundation for the rise of SANY’s unmanned products, leading to a new era of greater levels of efficiency and accuracy.