Hydraulic Drive Fan Design

A global market leader in heavy machinery manufacturing approached ARI to develop a new Fan design that replaces the standard drive fan option

Project Scope

A global market leader in heavy machinery manufacturing approached ARI to develop a new Fan design that replaces the standard drive fan option.

Business Challenges

Traditional Off-Highway trucks utilize Direct Drive Fan options to cool the Engine, Coolant, Air and Fuels with a high rate of fan failures resulting in cooling performance and machine down time. The NPI deals with Hydraulic Drive Fan as a standard option where Fans are controlled by Hydraulic Motor, and which is directly mounted on cooling package. This Hydraulic Fan drive option gives the flexibility to turn ON/OFF the fan depending on the temperature requirements. Like in Cold weather regions we can Turn OFF the fan with addition of Near Zero value which eliminates over cooling of the machine. Whereas Direct drive fan is lacking that option as it is mounted on the engine and as long as Engine is ON fan will rotate irrespective of weather conditions. This Option also eliminates lot of warranty dollars customer is paying for downtime and improves Fuel efficiency as Fan is no longer rotating all the time (lesser load on Engine). Through the ARi design, quality and reliability of the cooling system improved resulting in improved cooling performance.

ARi’s Solutions

ARI developed driver-specific APIs (Application Program Interface) independent of ECU Hardware.

Developed the Fan motor and fan support structure to place the fan directly on the cooling package.

Developed Hydraulic Oil cooler based on the heat loads driven by Fan to cool the Hydraulic Oil.

Developed non-metallic Shroud to accommodate much shorter version of Hydraulic Fan (distance between the Fan and radiator cores are much smaller compared to traditional direct drive option).

Collaborated with Cross Functional teams to design the system to meet customer’s requirement.

Analyzed the design with Pro/Mechanical, completed VST and Bolted Joint on the entire package.

Collaborated with suppliers to make sure there are no known issues. with manufacturing and implement any cost reduction options.

Worked with Global Purchasing team to issue tooling PO’s to supplier and procure the parts for Pilot

machines.

Supported Pilot machine builds at Customers facility and complete on-machine testing activities.

Addressed all the Pilot build issues noticed during Pilot Build and Production released designs.

ARi’s Value Proposition

Address major field issues related to Direct Drive Fan and Eliminate over cooling issues in Colder regions.

Improves the Fuel Efficiency as the Fan is no longer rotates all the time when the machine is ON.

Improves Customer machine sales as this NPI will provide Better Gas Mileage, Controlled/On-Demand Cooling performance and eliminates machine downtimes.