Peace and quiet in residential area despite construction site

6:30 a.m. in Uppsala, Sweden. Swerock's new iONTRON eBSF quietly drives onto the construction site in a residential area. Only the gravel crunches under the wheels and you can hear a slight humming from the electric motor. The eBSF is the world's first fully electric truck-mounted concrete pump with a 42-metre distribution boom. Its first job today is the floor slab for a new nursery school.

Adam Malmborg, the pump operator at Swerock, is enthusiastic about the new machine. ‘I was previously assigned to a Putzmeister M20-4 truck-mounted concrete pump, but the new 42 is nice and quiet and comfortable to drive.’ He drove almost 50 kilometres from his base in Rosersberg, north of Stockholm, to the construction site. This required 18% of the battery charge.

A power distributor has been set up on the construction site so that he can charge the batteries with 22 kW while he works. Putzmeister calls this system ‘work while charge’. The engineers at Putzmeister and Volvo Group had to tinker with this, as it is a situation that the Volvo FM Electric 8x4 rigid tridem e-truck is not really familiar with. It either drives or it charges.

Adam sets up the machine and the first truck mixers arrive. The support, the movement of the distribution boom and, of course, the pumping of the concrete are all fully electric. For the Putzmeister and Volvo Group engineers on site who are accompanying this first deployment, suddenly completely different noises can be heard. The hydraulic switching of the core pump and the flow of concrete in the pipeline are sounds that are often drowned out by the diesel engine in diesel-powered concrete pumps. The Volvo offers 220 kW of power, enabling the built-in .15 i LS concrete pump to deliver up to a maximum of 150 m³/h of concrete. That much is not needed today. Adam is pumping the floor slab at 30 and 35 m³/h.

The concreting team is also enthusiastic about the quietness on the construction site. The next step, according to the end hose operator, is for the truck mixers to also run on electricity. But Putzmeister also offers a solution for this with the eMischer P9, the fully electric truck mixer with a 9 m³ mixing drum. After 100 m³ of C30/37 concrete, the eBSF has successfully passed its baptism of fire and is returning to base with a battery charge (SoC) of just under 30%.