VMAC, and Stealth Power out of Austin, Texas, have come up with a battery-electric powered compressor complete with a telematics package.
The e30 is a compact, lightweight 30 cfm rotary screw compressor.
VMAC says it’s 24% smaller than competitors’ systems, 16% lighter, and has 15% more runtime.
It has the potential to alter the spec’ing of service trucks but is the demand there?
“With the change in administration, the push on electric vehicles and sustainability and those conversations are now different,” says Christina Arrington, VP of government relations for Stealth Power.
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“But I think the thing that doesn't change about the electric technology is the demand for a better work environment and the demand for better resiliency on your actual systems,” Arrington says. “Sustainability is nice. It's an amazing thing to have. We all want to do better, but we all have jobs and missions to accomplish, and so we have people to take care of.
“[This unit] is very quiet, and that alone is a huge offering for anyone working in the field next to loud generators, and we see that at Stealth across all of the different sectors that we're in—people want quiet power that's reliable and resilient. So, I think that push alone will be huge,” she says.
The telematics aspect will also be attractive to customers, the companies agree.
Telematics availability
“We're becoming such a data-driven society, but we need that to also be functional, usable data,” Arrington says. “That's where the Stealth intelligence side comes in. All of our systems are wired to these intelligent systems. Not only do they collect data, but they also parse it, filter it, and send it on to the user appropriately.
“The guy or gal in the field will get different information that's relevant to them, versus the fleet manager, who will get the information relevant to them, as opposed to piles of data,” Arrington says. “That will drive demand, too.”
For the compressor’s battery-electric power system, that will mean information such as the state of charge and remaining runtime.
“But we also have the ability to tell information about the compressor,” Arrington says. “It's going to look at predictive analytics and maintenance, or is there unusual activity? Now it's not necessarily going to tell them it's vibrating funny, but it's going to give them signals that something's off when you're switching this on, or that it ran this amount of time and usually it runs this amount of time.
“And it can send alerts,” she says. “And, over time, as it starts to get through the machine learning and the predictive analytics that our system does on the back end, it can start saying, ‘Hey, I've noticed that runtime is coming down. You're going to need to change something out, or switch something.’”
Monitoring heat
Another important monitoring feature is battery heat.
“We’ve got temperature gages on there,” Arrington says. “This [application] especially matters because they want to keep it at an optimum temperature, so you don't get water runoff. A lot of the design went in to make sure that there would be no excess water. We actually have internal heat blankets and fans that will manage the heat of our system to ensure optimal charging and discharging of the pack. The system will maintain itself.”
NMC (Nickel Manganese Cobalt) battery technology provides up to 45 minutes of runtime at full air output. The batteries can be charged with independent 120V shore power.
VMAC is targeting availability early next year.
About the Author
Frank Raczon
Raczon’s writing career spans nearly 25 years, including magazine publishing and public relations work with some of the industry’s major equipment manufacturers. He has won numerous awards in his career, including nods from the Construction Writers Association, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, and BtoB magazine. He is responsible for the magazine's Buying Files.