Integrated Hydraulic Solutions UK (IHS) recently designed and built a brand new portable powerpack for one of its customers.

The specially designed unit will be used to proof test finished bitumen hot boxes, which are fitted to the rear of bitumen mixers in road construction machinery. Each hot box has to be stripped and then rebuilt. In the past, companies did not have any way of testing their refurbished equipment other than fit it to the road laying vehicle (very time consuming – especially if it fails first time out).

IHS was given the task of reproducing the same control functions that the bitumen road laying truck has (operational functions) whilst producing a pluggable hydraulic power supply to replicate the bitumen truck whilst the hotbox is still in the workshop. This solution allows all functions to be tested before being fitted to a vehicle.

The hydraulic power pack has the capability of 7 external functions (hydraulic cylinders and motors) whilst incorporating electrical safety circuit and electronic soft start technology with phase sensing technology to eliminate starting the electrically driven hydraulic pump in the wrong direction (damaging the hydraulic pump).