A 200-tonne drive system for a Herrenknecht AG tunnel boring machine has been moved in a tandem lift from a heavy goods vehicle onto a ship at the Rhine port of Kehl.
The Demag duo consisting of two all-terrain cranes, a Demag AC 500-8 and a Demag AC 700-9, in addition to three trucks and an escort vehicle, were used for the early morning operation on Thursday (January 19, 2017).
Perfect weather conditions meant four members of the MSG crane company needed two hours to prepare each crane for the 200-tonne load as a counterweight of 100 tonnes was required on the AC 700-9 all-terrain crane.
Reinhard Schmitt, crane operator of the AC 700-9, said: “It all came down to how our two crane operators were able to work together with utmost accuracy.
“They had to stay perfectly coordinated in order to ensure that the weight would remain properly distributed between both cranes at all times.
“A challenge, to be sure, but the crane operators’ experience and the high precision of the Demag cranes being used helped that it was easily overcome.”
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Working together, the AC 500-8 and the AC 700-9 had to lift the tunnel boring machine drive system to a height of three meters, lift the drive system off from the heavy goods vehicle, move it over the ship and place it back down.
The MSG team determined the best crane configuration for the lift consisted of using a boom length of 25.5 meters and star-shaped outrigger bases, designed to attain a high level of stiffness while minimizing the amount of deformation that occurs when lifting loads, extended to a length of twelve meters to provide the necessary stability.
For the AC 500-8 all-terrain crane, the team used a boom length of 24 meters, a counterweight of 140 tonnes and extended the outrigger bases to a length of 9.60 meters.
Eight Herrenknecht tunnel boring machines have created the continuous rail link through London as part of the 14.8 billion pound Crossrail project that will be completed in 2018. Watch the video below:
