Dynatest International A/S, its subsidiary Dynatest Consulting, Inc. (a USA corporation), and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) of South Africa, are pleased to announce the manufacturing relocation to Michigan, USA of a major Dynatest/CSIR product, the Dynatest/CSIR Heavy Vehicle Simulator (HVS). The HVS has until now been manufactured in South Africa. A recent USA origin contract award to manufacture and deliver a Dynatest/CSIR HVS Mark VI system stimulated Dynatest to transition its HVS manufacturing to within close proximity of its Westland, Michigan USA office. Teaming with suppliers, such as Ideal Fabricators Inc. in Livonia, Michigan, the eighteen month project to build the 100 foot, thirty-four ton machine, supports local industry and the jobs and related economic benefits such industry represents to the Westland/Livonia area. It is anticipated that additional HVS projects will come on line during 2010 and ensuing years.
Dynatest was founded in 1976 in Denmark by a group of engineers and technicians who combined science, technology and business into the development and manufacturing of highly specialized equipment and methodology for pavement engineering. Since 1976, Dynatest has grown to become a multinational organization with offices in a number of countries around the world, including four offices in the USA. Dynatest's objective is to develop, and to make available to the pavement industry, a full range of non-destructive and destructive pavement test equipment with supporting engineering software and services to facilitate the preservation, design and management of pavement networks.
The HVS, first produced in South Africa in the1960’s, has gone through a number of changes over the years, and has become the world’s leading and most productive Accelerated Pavement Testing (APT) device. The original concept of the HVS was to provide the capability to pavement engineers to rapidly test, often to pavement failure, actual in-service or “real” road pavement. The HVS needed to be mobile and self contained so it could be used to evaluate the life expectancy of the pavement. With its large-scale size and variable loading, the HVS allows pavement engineers to build a full scale pavement structure, rapidly apply realistic load repetitions and study structural pavement design, materials properties, pavement performance, pavement rehabilitation procedures and construction techniques. Operating 24 hours per day seven days a week, the HVS can apply twenty years of traffic loading to a pavement in approximately three months providing quick and accurate assessment of the expected life of a pavement design. The HVS can optionally apply loads up to 200kN, with the standard maximum 100kN load translating into almost one million ESAL’s (Equivalent Single Axle Loads) per day, using bi-directional loading.
There are currently ten HVS systems working in a number of locations including South Africa, Sweden, United States (California, Maine, Mississippi, Florida), and HVS systems were recently shipped to facilities in China and India. |
