New Cat 789D Autonomous Water Truck defeats dust and controls costs through automated water delivery
Authored by: Press Release
Helping prevent haul road overwatering and underwatering, the new Cat® 789D Autonomous Water Truck (AWT) enhances productivity by enabling mine operations to digitally track water consumption and reduce waste. Fully integrating into the mine site’s Cat Command autonomous haulage fleet to control haul road dust, the market’s first commercially available AWT is built on the field-proven 789D mining truck chassis and integrates the truck, tank and Cat Water Delivery System (WDS), connected with Cat MineStar technology.
Featuring Command for hauling, the new 789D AWT offers the same potential for greater utilization than staffed equipment. The fully autonomous truck reduces shift changes, meal breaks and other operational delays to improve efficiency. Complying with watering plans, the water truck seamlessly interacts with other autonomous equipment and integrates with customer mining processes and systems managed by MineStar.
“To meet customer requirements for dust control, Caterpillar implemented a MineStar-integrated watering model based on many years of site watering studies and Cat WDS performance data,” said Corey Wurtzbacher, general manager and vice president of technology and global sales support. “This model allows the truck to monitor traffic, weather and road conditions, prioritize what areas need watered, when the areas need watered, and how many passes it should take to apply the correct amount of water saturation, for the given conditions. The integration of Caterpillar’s many years of autonomous truck operations and water delivery development have been combined to make a high performing autonomous watering solution.”
The 789D is the largest Cat water truck product offering that can accommodate up to 165,000 l (43,588 gal), depending on tank configuration. The AWT senses when the water tank is running low and can be programmed to integrate with the water refill station to fully automate the water refill process. The auto shutoff feature prevents tank overfilling.
