Air-operated side-tippers to be made in Alice

For those who’ve never been to a road-train tipping site, let’s fill in some info. When tipper operators started to operate road trains, it soon became obvious that rear tippers had too many compromises, so roadwork and construction sites were mostly designed around side-tipping road trains.

As a side-tipping road train unloads, it deposits windrows of material beside each trailer, rather than a conical pile at the rear of each jack-knifed trailer. Manoeuvring and tipping time is greatly reduced by the side-tipping option.

Traditional side-tippers employ hydraulic rams, but that requires dedicated prime movers, with on-board hydraulics and a transmission power take off. Unlike rear-tippers, side-tippers need relatively short ‘stroke’ and that started Air Tip inventor, Clarke Petrick, thinking about employing the action of the air bellows commonly used in truck and trailer suspensions.

Clarke Petrick comes from a geophysics background in Australia’s mining industry, but he grew up in a family involved with road transport.

His early efforts, using air bellows as ‘rams’ worked and many are still in service, but improvements have been made over the years. Trucksales ran a report on Air Tip back in 2014.

Additional air tanks are fitted to the trailer, but otherwise an Air Tip trailer uses the truck’s standard engine-driven air compressor and pneumatic system. Upfront cost is considerably less, Air Tip says, and 100psi air-system operating pressure results in lower servicing and hazard issues, compared with 3000psi hydraulics.

More recently, Air Tip systems have been fitted to compacting waste trailers, allowing rear loading for maximum load density and side-tipping for quick unloading. The prime movers hauling these waste trailers need no air system modifications.

The Air Tip system can be switch-activated remotely, so any fleet prime mover can couple to an AirTip trailer.

Air Tip claims that trailer integrity is improved over that of hydraulic-tip units, while reducing the overall weight of the average side-tipping trailer trailer by 12 per cent and increasing the trailer’s payload by 4.8 per cent.

The recently announced Air Tip manufacturing project will expand Territory-based design and engineering capability, in collaboration with Ross Engineering and the Complete Group, with co-investment from the Northern Territory Government via the Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC) managed by Advanced Manufacturing Ecosystem Fund (AMEF).

The Advanced Manufacturing Growth Centre (AMGC) is an industry-led, not-for-profit organisation. AMGC’s vision is to transform Australian manufacturing to become an internationally competitive, dynamic and thriving industry with advanced capabilities and skills at its core.

The Advanced Manufacturing Ecosystem (AME) Fund of $7.5 million seeks to build the advanced manufacturing ecosystem in the Northern Territory.

Air Tip’s co-funded project, worth $553,000, will combine equal investments of $276,500 from the Northern Territory Government’s AMEF and Air Tip and is anticipated to create 10 new jobs in the Northern Territory over five years, including engineering, fabrication, professional and apprentice roles in Alice Springs.

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The Northern Territory’s Minister for Advanced Manufacturing, Nicole Manison, Managing Director of AMGC, Dr Jens Goennemann and AMGC’s Northern Territory Director, Charmaine Phillips all praised the manufacturing initiative.

“This co-investment will have broader implications across the Territory, giving Air Tip, Ross Engineering and the Complete Group the capability to design, engineer and fabricate componentry in Alice Springs – a capability once outsourced interstate," said founder and Managing Director of Air Tip, Clarke Petrick.

“The addition of new robotic laser cutting and CNC capabilities will enable us to test, develop and commercialise the Air Tip system in shorter timeframes, reducing the lag effect of having to outsource core manufacturing processes,” Petrick concluded.