The hoist is scheduled to be installed by the end of the year in the United Arab Emirates to help build, and to maintain, machinery for a vertical cement factory for German construction contractor Polysius.
Inverter drives will move the trolley on a curved track beam. The trolley has a turning circle of 22m. Height of lift is 10m.
The hoist is comparatively cheap, says managing director Heinz Helmut Kempkes, because it is built of standard components. A spreader beam with a single central hook is supported by a hook on either end. These hook blocks are each shared by two hoists, one on either side of the main beam. Each hoist is reeved into the hook block with six falls of rope, making a total of 24 rope falls. In other words, Kuli has bolted together four standard 8t-capacity wire rope hoists to lift 192t. A 15.5kW motor powers each hoist.
Although the hoists are electrically linked, and so start and stop at the same time, the hoists are not electronically linked, and so there is no protection against the spreader beam coming out of level. As this crane will only lift infrequently, the positional error will not be great, and the operator can level out the beam by raising the spreader bar to the upper travel limits.
