Stevenel, based in Tampere, Finland is an engineering company who have, for the last 10 years, been designing and manufacturing attachments for general cargo for ports and industrial terminals. All of their products include CE-marking, thus, EU-directives are the basis for their engineering. Stevenel design and manufacture attachments solely for general cargo focussing on break bulk cargo.
Both fully automated and semi-automated attachment solutions are offered including attachments for:
• Wood pulp handling
• Sawn Timber handling
• Steel product handling
• Big Bag handling
• Paper Reel handling
• Pallet cargo handling
• Mold and ingot handling
Typically the cranes with which their spreaders are used are fully hydraulic material handling cranes weighing between 60 tonnes and 220 tonnes. Where fully automated spreaders are concerned, labour force can be kept to a minimum, and the cost of the service which the port operator is providing is therefore also minimised due to the high efficiency of modern lifting equipment. Take wood pulp handling for example, using a Stevenel PU-4 spreader with a 120 tonne size material handling crane. Production rates with this spreader have been recorded at 450 tonnes/hour. Automated catching and releasing of the pulp unit wires mean that only a crane driver is needed for this operation.
Using the traditional method (a manual spreader) the production rate has been recorded at 150 tonnes/hour with four Dockers required at the quay or at the hold of a vessel. As can be seen, an 80 per cent cost savings in manpower has been produced. As well, turnaround time of the vessel can essentially be reduced from 27 hours to nine hours of effective loading time when 4,000 tonnes of wood pulp is loaded into the vessel.
Most of Stevenel’s products have modular structures, so all attachments, if required, can be manufactured to individual customer specifications. Stevenel’s latest spreader developments are for various steel cargoes and spreaders for cable cranes.
Steel cargoes include:
• Steel billets
• Long steel profiles
• Wire/plate coils
• Steelpipes
• Steel plates
• Rebar bundles
For cable cranes automated attachments for wood pulp and semi-automated spreaders for timber handling are available. In the last few years Stevenel have expanded their markets from Nordic countries to the rest of the Europe with strong co-operation with major material handling crane manufacturers and their distributors
