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April 2016 www.coalage.com 37 mining tires continued December press conference in Mumbai, the company has come a long way since his father founded it in 1954, initially pro- ducing bicycle tires for the Indian domes- tic market, and later, tires for the heavier tricycle vehicles widely used throughout the country for public transportation. Output has risen from 10 metric tons per day (mtpd) to 600 mtpd and will grow to 800 mtpd by 2017. The company's prod- uct portfolio includes more than 2,400 SKUs — all OTR tires, as it doesn't make any products for on-highway applications. Its radial and bias-ply OTR lines include models for rigid and articulated haulers, wheel loaders, graders and several types of underground mining vehicles, as well as non-mining applications ranging from port equipment and cranes down to lawn and garden care utility vehicles. The size and scope of the Bhuj plant gives the strongest hint of the company's market-leadership aspirations; it encom- passes more than 300 acres, of which 72 acres are taken up with roofed central plant facilities, and also includes the country's only OTR test track along with a 25,000- sq-ft research and development facility, plus worker and visitor accommodations and a dedicated power plant. Its location in the windswept, desert environment of this region was mainly due to the need for efficient logistics arrangements, besides offering the best prospect for finding a suf- ficiently large land parcel. The Bhuj plant was built just 60 km away from the port of Mundra, located on the Gulf of Kutch in the Arabian Sea. It is India's largest private port facility and can handle some of the shipping industry's deepest-draft contain- er vessels. Although it is only operating at slight- ly less than half of its capacity right now, eventually the plant will output 325 mtpd of tire products, representing an annual output of more than 150,000 mt. (In com- parison, BKT's three other plants produce 150,000 mtpy combined.) To achieve these production levels, it needs large quanti- ties of basic tire-making materials such as carbon black, crumb rubber, soft clay and other materials, sourced from suppliers in several countries. In addition, Poddar said BKT has pur- sued supplier certification from major mobile mining equipment OEMs such as Caterpillar, and is intent on securing fur- ther certifications from others in order to vault from its current status as a replace- ment-tire provider to an OEM outfitter. The ability to supply large volumes of tires to meet OEM requirements is a necessity for meeting certification standards, and BKT believes the Bhuj plant's location and logistics setup is well-suited to achieve that goal. "The Bhuj production site is a mile- stone in BKT's growth," said Lucia Salma- so, managing director of BKT Europe. "Not only for its high levels of technical and quality standards, but also because it is the BKT plant that is situated nearest to a port, a decisive factor to speed up delivery time. Likewise, this is a great benefit for compa- nies that have chosen BKT tires as original equipment." BKT said it churns out more than 300 tire molds each year, enabling it to provide very short development-to-market cycles. Putting It All Together Construction of the plant began in early 2011 and the first tires were produced a lit- tle more than a year later — although the plant won't be fully completed until the end of this year. Inside the production facility, a vis- itor's first visual impression is of seem- ingly endless, thick ribbons of rubber emerging from the facility's 13 high-ca- pacity mixers — the largest mixer facility in India — as the machines blend various combinations of raw ingredients fed by an automated charging system designed to provide high levels of product consis- tency and quality. From that stage on, the process involves both machine-assisted and manual application of numerous in- ternal components included in each tire model's design. For the 27.00R49 Earth- Max, 59 components — ranging from small special-purpose rubber strips to steel-reinforced fabric layers and met- al bead rings — are needed to complete each tire. All raw tire assemblies even- tually reach the curing stage, where they are heated under pressure in custom molds to produce a final product with the correct shape, dimensions and tread pattern. In the case of the 27.00R49, cur- ing takes nine hours, and the plant can produce three of these tires per day. A soon-to-be-completed R&D; facility at Bujh will enable the company to study, test and validate new tire compound for- mulations, component designs, tread patterns and performance parameters. The R&D; center will house three tire test wheels ranging in size from 1.5 m to 5 m in diameter. To further improve quality, BKT has a continuous monitoring process that col- lects account feedback from distributors and on-the-job reports from end users. These monitoring activities are carried out by technical support teams assigned to global regions in cooperation with BKT's field technicians who visit customers to check tire conditions, pressure, wear and product life-cycle status. "Our ultimate goal is to achieve lead- ership in the OTR market worldwide" through continuous evolution of products and services, said Poddar. The largest tire produced by the Bhuj plant currently is BKT's 27.00R49 EarthMax model for large earthmovers, but it has plans to produce 51- and possibly 57-in. tires in the future.