When military convoys need to leave a dangerous situation, they need to move fast. But the heavy excavating equipment the Canadian Armed Forces needs to help it do its job in Afghanistan and other combat environments hasn't been built for speed.
Until now.
Thanks to Fred Smith, Vern Eck and the team at ARVA Industries Inc., the Canadian military now has a tractor that is a backhoe and loader, but which travels under its own power at convoy speeds of 110 kilometres per hour.
Called the Multi-Purpose Engineer Vehicle (MPEV), the excavator has a specially designed engine whose radiator system allows it to operate in temperatures ranging from -40 oF to 120 oF. The rollover-protected armoured cab is built to withstand the blast from roadside bombs. The MPEV was created to negotiate curves without leaning or bouncing, and can be driven by just one person. All that, and the MPEV can also fit inside a C-130 Hercules aircraft, the Canadian Forces' workhouse transport plane.
Now, Canadian soldiers no longer have to risk their lives by loading and unloading an unwieldy backhoe/loader from a trailer while their convoy is under fire.
"This is a remarkable Canadian success story," Smith says proudly.
Smith is the president and co-owner, with partner Eck, of ARVA, a small, 42-person firm based in St. Thomas, Ontario. The company took a major risk in 2002 by responding to the Canadian military's request for this special vehicle – a risk many companies would not consider.
The military's contract called for a company to design, manufacture and test this new piece of equipment within a six-month window. It was a challenging request – could anyone manufacture the electronic diesel engine with the heating and cooling attributes necessary for a construction vehicle, as the Department of National Defence had specified? And given the timeframe, the MPEV would have to be made from conventional off-the-shelf components, which had never been designed to fit together.
For a small company devoting the majority of its resources to this project, the risk of failure was high.
ARVA had a history of successful NRC-IRAP supported projects. But this time, "the NRC-IRAP team could also see that this was indeed a risky project." says Smith.
But ARVA's technical advisor with NRC-IRAP, Charlie Johnson, had faith in the company. And Smith, Eck and Terry McQuillen, the project manager, had faith in the ARVA team. So with the help of NRC-IRAP funding, in 2004, ARVA went ahead and built the first MPEV, which they then tested for 500 hours, around the clock, to make sure it performed to specifications. If the MPEV failed for more than four hours on any one day, the company would have to start all over again.
"We didn't have to start over. It worked like a Swiss watch," says Smith.
ARVA rebuilt the successful prototype as a production unit, and made a second one. By the third one, the MPEV turned a profit. To date, the company has built 30 of the $600,000 vehicles for the Canadian military, and is marketing them to other countries as well, including the United States.
The NRC-IRAP funding helped the company buy a 3-D engineering system that permits ARVA to undertake finite element analysis, allowing the company to predict and compensate for weaknesses in design that might develop over time.
ARVA, which also builds air transportable cranes and rail cars, is now working on the next MPEV innovation -- a remote-control system that would allow the MPEV to lead a convoy and take the brunt of roadside bombs, while being controlled by the vehicle behind it.
