New giant Mammoet super heavy cranes

Taking shape on the drawing board at Mammoet in the Netherlands is a pair of new giant heavy lift cranes for application in petrochemical, power, offshore and civils markets worldwide.

"We see it as a totally new generation of super heavy lift cranes. These cranes are not already there in the market, if you look at the load-moment capacity," explained Jan van Seumeren Jr, Mammoet chief technical officer.

"The main advantages are that they are very compact, ring-based and very versatile in terms of slewing and travelling with load. They are fully containerised, slewing is by bogies, hoisting and booming up and down is by winches so they are like a typical traditional crane like our other PTC ring cranes but much bigger - three to four times the capacity," van Seumeren continued.

"We will focus on the existing markets that we are already in; petrochemical, power, offshore and civils. In the nuclear power industry we see that demand is coming for new plants. We decided to build this crane because we see a change in the market. Clients are asking us if we can lift bigger pieces - modular construction - higher or at longer radius."

There will be two models, the PTC 120 DS and the PTC 160 DS, 120,000 tonne-metres and 160,000 tonne-metres load moment. The outer ring base from the smaller crane is the inner ring base for the larger one.

The plan is to build the 160 first unless there is a call beforehand for the 120. The design will allow the cranes to travel, carrying a load, on their rail tracks. They can also be moved fully rigged on self propelled modular transporters.

"To give you an idea of capacity, with the PTC 160 DS, we can lift 3,200 tonnes at 44 m radius with 85 m boom. The PTC 120 DS lifts 3,200 tonnes at 36 m radius and with 85 m boom," van Seumeren explained.

Main boom length will be 70 to 140 m. The fly jib, with a capacity of 1,600 tonnes, will have a minimum length of 18 m and a maximum of 100 m. maximum boom and jib combination will be 140 + 100 m. The fixed jib is 18 to 40 m and capacity will be 3,200 tonnes.

"It is a very compact design. The ring on the PTC 120 DS is 41 m in diameter and, if you take the total, including the mats, it is just under 45 m.

"If you take an ordinary crawler crane, say 1,250 or 1,350 tonne capacity and you take the ballast radius with counterweight, you are already much over this. We have a very compact base, achieved using a lot of counterweight - 3,400 tonnes."

Just for perspective, a 1,350 tonne capacity crawler crane has about 600 tonnes of counterweight and a ballast radius of about 30 m, van Seumeren says (giving a 60 m swing circle diameter).

Maximum ground bearing pressure on both cranes will be 27 tonnes per square metre under full load.

There are four 800 tonne capacity hoisting winches and two topping winches. Hoisting speed is 10 m/min.

"We have very high speed winches so you can either do heavy loads relatively quickly or smaller loads very quickly. Another advantage of the new crane is the boom head, which has a swivelling top block for less rigging.

All engineering is being done in-house at Mammoet and it will be assembled and tested there too. Testing is scheduled for the beginning of 2011 followed by delivery in the third quarter 2011.

For the full story on these new cranes see the August issue of International Cranes and Specialized Transport magazine.

Preliminary specifications