Pump Truck Meaning: Concrete Pumps and Pallet Trucks

A pump truck on a building site is a truck-mounted concrete pump: a heavy vehicle that carries a concrete pump and a folding placing boom, and pushes fresh concrete through a pipeline to the exact point where it is poured. It does not usually bring the concrete itself: ready-mix trucks discharge it into the pump's hopper, and the pump moves it up to a slab, over a building or down into a basement, faster and more precisely than placing it by hand. In a warehouse the meaning changes: there, a pump truck is a hand pallet truck, explained at the end of this entry.

How a concrete pump truck works

The hopper at the rear takes the concrete from the mixer's chute, and an agitator keeps it moving. It feeds a piston pump with two delivery cylinders. An S-shaped transfer tube in the hopper, the S valve, swings from one cylinder to the other at the end of each stroke, so the flow into the line does not stop. The delivery line runs along the placing boom, an arm built from four or five sections that unfold in a Z or roll fold, and ends in a flexible end hose that a worker guides over the formwork.

Putzmeister's M56, with 55.1 m of vertical reach, is rated at a pressure of 85 bar or, with its largest pump unit, an output of 190 m³ of concrete an hour: theoretical maximums that cannot be reached together. Before the boom moves, the operator sets the outriggers: support legs that swing or telescope out from the chassis and carry the machine while the boom is extended. Pump trucks are used for foundations, floor slabs, bridges and multi-storey buildings, wherever large volumes have to be placed quickly and accurately.

Boom sizes, axles and weights

Pump trucks are named after the vertical reach of their boom. Putzmeister's US brochure lists boom pumps from the 20Z-Meter with 19.46 m of vertical reach to the 70Z-Meter with 69.29 m. The longer the boom, the heavier the chassis that has to carry it:

• Putzmeister's M42, with 41.6 m of vertical reach, sits on four axles, stays under 32 t gross weight, and is 11.4 m long and under 4.0 m high.
• The M56 comes on four or five axles, depending on the licensing rules of the country it is registered in, and is about 14.1 m long.
• Liebherr mounts its 50 M5 XXT, a 49.1 m pump, on a five-axle chassis in Europe, with an unladen weight the manufacturer puts significantly below 40 t.

Two things follow for dispatch. A pump truck sits in the same weight range as a heavy goods vehicle, the class above 3.5 tonnes with its own road rules: its driver needs a category C licence, and bridge weight limits, axle loads and height restrictions apply to every trip, even though it carries no goods. And it needs space on site: with standard support, the M42 spreads its outriggers 7.5 m wide at the front and 8.3 m at the rear, the M56 9.0 m and 12.4 m. A site entrance that a mixer gets through can still be too tight for the pump to set up.

Planning a pump truck job

A pump is booked for a pour, not for a delivery. It has to be set up before the first mixer arrives and stays until the last load is placed, so a delay on the road holds up every mixer queuing behind it. Before the truck leaves the yard, the dispatcher needs three answers: which route can carry its weight and height, how long the drive takes at the planned departure time, and how long the pump will stand on site. A second pour the same afternoon only works if the journey from one site to the other, on roads the vehicle may use, fits into the gap, which is what a route planner built for the dimensions and weights of heavy vehicles works out.

The other pump truck: the hand pallet truck

In warehouses and on delivery tours, pump truck names something much smaller: the hand pallet truck. Toyota Material Handling lists pump truck among its common names, next to manual pallet jack and pallet pump. The name comes from the handle: the operator pumps it up and down, and a small hydraulic pump raises the forks until the pallet clears the floor.

The lift is short, because the truck only has to move the pallet, not stack it. Jungheinrich's AM 22, for example, carries up to 2,200 kg and lifts 122 mm. For drivers it is everyday equipment at addresses without a dock or forklift: the pallet is rolled to the back of the load bed on the pallet truck, lowered on a tail lift that brings each pallet down from the load bed to the ground, and wheeled to the door. Models come in several fork lengths and widths to suit the pallet types and sizes used in European road freight.