In the construction and engineering industry, the use of heavy equipment in the construction of buildings is as old as man himself and dates back to at least 1st century BC. According to thos history, the ancient Roman architect and civil engineer, Marcus Vitruvius Polio, escribed cranes and other construction equipment in his writing named De architectura. Additionally, heavy machines were pulled by horses or humans until the 19th century, while there has been steady and consistent progress since then.
There are several equipment that are of use in the construction industry which are used for both small and large scale purposes. A variety of these equipment are used for building and structural construction, construction of road, underwater and other marine construction work, power projects, etc. More so, depending on whether the construction work is small or large scale, a number of operations are involved, which also utilize different construction equipment, some of which are excavation and digging of large quantities of Earth, placement of construction materials such as bricks, concrete, compacting and leveling, dozing, grading, hauling, etc.
However, based on application and purpose, construction equipment are categorized into four sections namely; Earth moving equipment, construction vehicle, material handling equipment and construction equipment.
Earth moving equipment
These ere equipment that are used in the construction industry to shift large amount of earth, dig foundations and landscape areas. These include bulldozers, hydraulic excavators, compressors and loaders.
Construction vehicles
These are heavy duty vehicles with special design to execute construction tasks (civil engineering) especially those involving earth movement. Examples include tankers, trailers, tippers and dumpers.
Construction equipment
This is a term used to describe machines such as concrete mixers, pavers, heavy duty pumps, stone crushers, road rollers and tunneling equipment. These are often used at construction sites, agricultural fields and waste landfills.
Material handling equipment
As the name implies, these are construction equipment that enables the movement and transport of construction materials from one location to another. These include forklifts, cranes, conveyors and hoists.
Besides the above mentioned construction equipment, the drilling equipment has found significant use in the construction industry. Drilling equipment are used to create holes in the subsurface of the earth. These equipment can be massive structures housing equipment used to drill water wells, oil wells or even natural gas well. They are not necessarily massive in structure or size, as such some can even be moved manually by an individual, and for instance is the auger. Basically, there are three types of drilling equipment namely; full hydraulic underground drill machine, spindle type driller and the hydraulic surface driller.
The full hydraulic drilling equipment is suitable for drilling holes for the purpose of mine exploration, investigation of land or subsurface for minerals as it penetrates deep into the earth’s core to perform its operation. The spindle type driller similarly is suitable for drilling holes during mine exploration and railway engineering. The hydraulic surface drillers are used for blast hole drilling in construction. They have found use in civil engineering, dimension stone industry, mining and quarrying etc.
