Heavy mining operations rely on massive off-the-road (OTR) rubber tires to move thousands of tons of material daily. However, conventional pneumatic tires carry severe operational hazards, including dangerous blowouts, catastrophic tire fires, and persistent supply bottlenecks. Beyond direct safety risks to personnel, rubber tire disposal creates long-term environmental liabilities for mining companies worldwide. Operators have long sought an engineering breakthrough that eliminates pressurized tire failures without sacrificing hauling capacity.
Global Air Cylinder Wheels (GACW) solves this issue with its patented Air Suspension Wheel (ASW), an all-steel, mechanical wheel that replaces traditional rubber tires using internal pneumatic suspension cylinders. By eliminating pressurized combustible rubber, GACW delivers a non-explosive, fully recyclable, and durable alternative engineered for extreme industrial environments. In this Executive Q&A, we explore how GACW's technology is gaining industry recognition, scaling field trials, and preparing for commercial deployment across the global mining sector.
Q: Conventional mining tires present severe risks from explosive blowouts and catastrophic fires. How does the mechanical engineering of the Air Suspension Wheel permanently eliminate these hazards?
Harmen van Kamp: The fundamental difference is that the Air Suspension Wheel is a mechanically engineered wheel, not a large pressure vessel. A conventional mining tire behaves like an enormous rubber bladder or balloon. Although its operating pressure is typically about 100 to 110 psi, its immense air volume stores a tremendous amount of energy, which can be released catastrophically if the tire fails.
Our design removes that large pressurized tire chamber. Instead, the wheel consists of an outer drum, an inner rim, and air suspension cylinders positioned between them. This steel-based mechanical architecture removes the principal source of explosive blowouts associated with conventional pneumatic tires.
Conventional tires also generate heat as the loaded tire continually flexes while the vehicle operates. Because rubber insulates that heat, rising temperature can create a self-reinforcing cycle. Once a critical temperature is reached, the risk of an uncontrollable thermal failure or fire increases dramatically.
That matters at mining scale: some tires exceed 13 feet in diameter and weigh several tons. A failure can release enormous energy and create devastating consequences for workers and equipment. Rather than trying only to manage those hazards, the Air Suspension Wheel removes their underlying sources—the large pressurized chamber and the heat-retaining rubber tire structure—while providing suspension through a mechanical system of cylinders and dampers.
Q: GACW recently won the People’s Choice Safety Innovation Award at the Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety Conference in Australia. What does direct validation from over 1,200 site safety executives mean for your commercial rollout?
Harmen van Kamp: The award had an immediate impact on the visibility, acceptance, and implementation path for our technology. Australia is the world’s premier mining country, and the Queensland Mining Industry Health and Safety Conference is a major annual industry event.
We were the only wheel or tire product solution permitted to exhibit. That was significant because, according to the conference’s own statistics, the tire bay is the most dangerous area on a mine site and is treated as an exclusion zone. The audience understood the problem we are addressing at a very practical level.
More than 1,200 Senior Site Executives—SSEs—participated in the popular vote. These are the people responsible for mine-site operations and safety, and they are among the most important decision-makers and influencers in the adoption of new equipment.
We were one of five companies selected to present a safety innovation, and the Air Suspension Wheel won the People’s Choice Safety Innovation Award by an overwhelming vote. For us, that was extraordinary validation from the people who understand the risks associated with conventional mining tires firsthand.
The impact was noticeable immediately. The award gave the Air Suspension Wheel broad visibility across Queensland’s mining sector, and we were contacted by numerous mines interested in the technology. It helped accelerate discussions toward purchase orders and Project Execution Plans, and it also generated interest from people who subsequently invested in the company.
The award therefore meant much more than recognition for an engineering achievement. It increased awareness, opened direct conversations with operators, and helped move commercial opportunities forward. There is now widespread knowledge of the Air Suspension Wheel across Queensland mine sites, which is a powerful foundation for our rollout in Australia.
Q: Following successful extreme-condition testing in the U.S. Iron Ore belt, GACW established an operational Center of Excellence in Australia. How does this new facility accelerate on-site integration with Tier-1 mining operators?
Harmen van Kamp: For a mine site, selling the product is only the beginning. If you cannot maintain it, service it, and support it after installation, the product is effectively dead on arrival. Our Australian Center of Excellence gives us the physical base and local capability needed to support the Air Suspension Wheel throughout its operating life.
I describe it as a test, trial, and training center. We conduct research and development there, test and trial new components, train our own personnel, and train mining-company teams that will operate and maintain the wheel. It also gives our engineers and operational teams a dedicated place to work together on continued wheel development.
The center builds on the extreme-condition testing completed in the U.S. Iron Ore belt, including validation of our 13th-generation suspension cylinder design. It allows us to continue development while preparing the people, procedures, maintenance practices, and service capability required for deployment at active mine sites.
That local presence is critical because major operators must evaluate engineering, equipment compatibility, installation, maintenance, logistics, training, procurement, and after-sales support before adopting a new technology.
Our first-phase rollout begins with Australia and Indonesia. The second part of that first phase will extend the same operational model to the United States and Canada, including the local infrastructure needed for testing, training, maintenance, and service.
The Australian center therefore does more than bring us closer to Tier-1 operators. It helps convert engineering validation into practical mine-site readiness by giving customers access to training and support, while giving GACW a permanent operational base for product development and commercial deployment. Establishing comparable capability in the United States and Canada is next on our rollout plan.
Q: With more than 75 issued patents and over 120 pending applications worldwide, what technical hurdles did your engineering team overcome to ensure the ASW matches the payload and shock absorption of rubber tires?
Harmen van Kamp: Developing a mechanical alternative to conventional mining tires has required more than a decade of engineering, testing, failure analysis, and refinement. When you move from rubber and a pressurized air chamber to a mechanical wheel, everything changes: the geometry, architecture, payload capacity, lateral-force response, shock absorption, and the way loads move through the wheel, hub, and vehicle.
Our central challenge has been to reproduce the load-carrying, cushioning, and shock-absorption functions of a large pneumatic tire without relying on the tire’s pressurized chamber. That meant developing a completely new mechanical suspension architecture using cylinders and dampers within a steel-based wheel.
We progressed through multiple rounds of real-world testing on loaders and haul trucks, from smaller machines to some of the largest vehicles in the world. We deliberately pushed designs beyond their intended forces, studied how and why components failed, returned to the engineering, and tested again. That iterative process taught us what worked, what did not, and which forces had not previously been fully understood.
One of the realities of creating an entirely new wheel architecture is that you do not know what you do not yet know. During development, we identified behavior within the wheel, hub, and tire system that was not fully understood across parts of the vehicle and tire industries. Those discoveries helped shape our suspension, damping, tread, and mechanical-wheel technologies.
Our portfolio of more than 75 issued patents and more than 120 pending applications worldwide reflects that extensive development. The technical hurdles have been tremendous because this type of wheel did not previously exist. We are not making an incremental change to a tire; we are creating a fundamentally different way to carry load and absorb shock. In that very real sense, we are reinventing the wheel, and our continuing work is focused on manufacturing maturity and deployment in active mining operations.
Q: Beyond safety, mining companies face intense pressure to meet environmental standards and reduce waste. How does a mechanical, steel-based wheel improve sustainability and life-cycle costs compared to short-lived rubber tires?
Harmen van Kamp: The sustainability problem with conventional mining tires is their short service life and the amount of material discarded. A large mining tire can weigh about 13,000 pounds. As with a passenger-car tire, only the tread profile is worn away, yet roughly 85 percent of the product is ultimately discarded.
A conventional mining tire typically lasts about 12 months on average, depending on operating conditions. By contrast, the structural base of our Air Suspension Wheel is designed to last as long as the vehicle—typically 10 to 15 years, subject to the application and operating environment.
Our wheel uses a steel-based mechanical structure with in-wheel suspension and individually replaceable tread segments on the outside. Because suspension and deflection occur inside the wheel rather than through the tread material, we can select rubbers, polyurethanes, and other materials that are better suited to specific mine-site conditions. That gives the tread the potential to last substantially longer than a conventional tire.
More importantly, we replace only the part that wears. The tread is the consumable; the wheel itself can be retreaded repeatedly. At the end of the wheel’s operating life, the steel-based structure is recyclable. This design has the potential to eliminate nearly all of the waste associated with repeatedly disposing of complete mining tires.
We are also introducing a wheels-as-a-service model. Rather than requiring a mine to make a traditional tire purchase, we can provide the wheels through a subscription structured as a predictable operating expense. The objective is to keep the mine’s wheel cost comparable to its conventional tire cost while allowing the operator to capture the additional benefits of the technology.
Those benefits can include increased production and truck availability, elimination of the blowout and fire risks associated with pneumatic tires, potential fuel savings, and more predictable maintenance. Because our wheel is mechanical, planned service can be coordinated with the truck’s existing maintenance intervals, reducing additional downtime. Together, longer tread life, repeated retreading, recyclable structural components, and improved equipment availability can materially reduce both environmental impact and total life-cycle cost.
Q: As you advance your commercialization milestones and capital campaigns, what is the strategic roadmap for deploying the Air Suspension Wheel across global haul fleets over the next few years?
Harmen van Kamp: Our strategic roadmap is a controlled and focused rollout. We are beginning with Australia and Indonesia. Australia applies some of the world’s highest mining, engineering, and safety standards, and success there provides strong validation for deployment in other markets. That is why we established our first Operational Center of Excellence in Australia.
The second part of our first-phase rollout will focus on the United States and Canada. We will expand only as quickly as we can provide the maintenance, training, parts, and after-sales service required to support the wheels throughout their operating life.
The wheels-as-a-service subscription model is central to that strategy. It was requested and encouraged by mine operators because it can lower the financial barrier to adoption and simplify the corporate approval process. Instead of a large upfront equipment purchase, the mine receives a predictable operating expense with tread replacement and cylinder-seal service included within the subscription scope.
That creates a more complete support model for the customer. GACW remains responsible for ensuring the wheel is maintained, while the mine can coordinate service through established local partners rather than building an entirely new tire-handling, labor, inventory, and logistics system around the technology.
We plan to work with authorized dealers and engineering companies in each market. In many cases, these are preferred partners introduced by the mining companies themselves. They already understand the site, the equipment, and the operator’s service requirements, and they can perform wheel maintenance under agreements aligned with the mine’s existing service structure.
Over time, we intend to establish additional regional Centers of Excellence to train and support those partners, conduct testing and development, and provide local technical capability. Building that network carefully is essential because maintenance and after-sales service are just as important as the product itself.
This approach lets us advance purchase orders and Project Execution Plans in a disciplined way while ensuring that every deployment is backed by trained people, service capacity, and reliable parts support.
Our longer-term objective is to establish the Air Suspension Wheel as the global standard for safer, longer-lasting heavy-equipment wheels. We will reach that goal market by market, using the Australian model as the foundation and scaling only when the support infrastructure is ready.
We also invite people to join us in that effort through our Regulation Crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine. The campaign is intended to raise up to $2.6 million to help fund our continued commercialization and expansion.
The transition from combustible rubber tires to mechanical air suspension marks a critical milestone for mining safety and asset efficiency. Eliminating explosive hazards protects frontline personnel while removing a persistent source of unscheduled vehicle downtime. Engineering solutions that solve structural safety risks directly at the component level deliver clear operational and financial value.
As global natural resource producers prioritize decarbonization and rigorous site safety standards, mechanical wheel technologies will play a central role in modernizing heavy haulage fleets. Robust field validation and growing international support position Global Air Cylinder Wheels to reshape standard haulage operations across the primary extraction sector.
To learn more visit https://globalaircylinderwheels.com/