As though governments were not already the most demanding of clients, they are also some of the most versatile, operating in nearly every industry, from defence to transport, energy to waste and even aerospace.
Accordingly, companies find a lot of areas for product specialisation for failure-proof and critical lift devices, and many offer specialist services that they can sell in one, or several government markets. In this article HM takes a look at providers for public defense, energy, and railway contracts, with some companies operating in several areas at once.
Well-established international suppliers to government sectors include Finnish Konecranes. Among the public markets Konecrnaes supplies are railways, shipyards and power plant lifting equipment. It has for example supplied an EOT crane and a 550t industrial crane for a publicly-owned Chinese generator manufacturer.
Looking towards the defense sector, the US Navy is notable crane buyer, with 5500 active cranes for shore side applications and an additional number of cranes active on board navy ships.
As well as local suppliers, it sometimes uses international suppliers such as Samsung Heavy Industries and Sumitomo Heavy Industries for portal cranes.
For supplying luffing cranes, it sometimes contracts Finnish cargohandling machinery manufacturer Cargotec, and sometimes uses South Korean manufacturer Doosan Industries as a supplier of Container Cranes.
Applications of shore side navy cranes include applications in repairing ships, aircraft and facilities. The vast majority are related to some form of ship, aircraft, and ordnance maintenance and repair.
The Navy’s Navy Crane Center in Porthsmouth, Virginia, is a US government contracting body for navy cranes and hoists.
In May of this year it awarded a set of crane and hoist suppliers in a multiple award contract, including Advanced Crane Technologies, Crane Technologies Group and Heco Pacific Manufacturing. The cranes will do lifting at a gear repair facility at Cherry Point, North Carolina.
In the US, industry standards stipulating on use and maintenance of hoists and cranes are applicable to government sector such as the navy just like they are applicable in the rest of the crane industry.
Standards applied on US Navy cranes include ASME B30 series, B30.2 Overhead and Gantry Cranes, and Asme HST SERIES OSHA 1920.179, 1910. 180, 1926 subpart CC CMAA #70 and #74.
In addition, the US Navy has its own weight handling design standards that supplement these standards (UFC-3-320- 07N). In this sense, it controls its own manufacturing tolerances.
Such public standards are verified by the government client during commissioning tests, and then often reassessed during regularly scheduled maintenance. The Navy often inspects criteria beyond those in the written standards for added safety.
One contractor that supplies to strict US Navy standards is American Crane, a company that acts as a supplier to multiple US government bodies, including the Navy and the US Department of Energy. NRC Accepted designs are often criteria.
American Crane typically supplies critical lift and failure proof cranes to government projects. While in the past it has earned its laurels by working on technical projects with NASA, its recent projects include supply of equipment for energy producers in the US states of Washington and Idaho. It’s a regular supplier of equipment to the Department of Energy for handling nuclear materials and other specialized applications.
These applications often use single failure proof and critical lift enhanced safety cranes. Devices installed include cask handling, turbine cranes, and polar cranes over 300 tons in capacity and 140 feet in span.
With headquarters in Eastern Pennsylvania, American Crane makes cranes, hoists and other handling equipment. It has three manufacturing facilities and 226,000 square feet of buildspace and a very large floor type horizontal boring mill and testing tower, giving it the ability to in-house a lot of component manufacturing.
Some of the components it makes include parts for standard, custom and nuclear applications. Its team includes mechanical, electrical and structural engineers as well as nuclear seismic experts.
American Crane uses in house resources for engineering, manufacturing and field service which it says ensures better quality and schedule adherence.
Beyond crane engineering it provides a host of services related to electronics and crane performance analysis. Structural analyses, dynamic modelling and seismic, failure modes and effects analyses, complete control system design, automation, non-destructive testing, and software development are offered.
American Cranes operate in many facilities, handling critical loads such as rocket engines, spacecraft, nuclear fuel and high explosives.
One recent project the company has worked on for the Department of Energy is a crane used for handling 177 tanks worth of radioactive and chemical waste at a vitrification plant Hanford Site in Washington state. The waste, generated when producers were making plutonium during the WWII era, been leaking into the nearby Columbia River.
Department of Energy’s new plant will be used for combining the waste with glass to make the harmful elements stable. Designed and built by San Francisco based construction and engineering firm Bechtel National Corporation, the vitrification plant will start operations in 2019 and finish vitrifying in 2047.
To tackle this demanding project, American Crane is supplying a specialised 3 tons crane designed to handle high levels of radiation on systems that allow for remote recovery of the waste which is being vitrified and put into 55 gallon carbon steel drums. The hoist lifts 6 tons and the bridge has a span of 17 feet.
The radioactive-waste handling crane is integrated with several redundancy features, some of them with secondary redundancy, for extra safety and reliability. They include a redundant hoist train drive components, redundant bridge drive providing remote recovery capabilities, and retrieval ability in case redundant bridge drive failure, Redundant electrical circuits for preventing common mode failures. Karen Norheim, vice president, marketing and IT of American Cranes, says, "As a supplier to the nuclear industry, American Crane has maintained a quality assurance program since 1996 that meets both 10 CFR 50, Appendix B, and ASME NQA-1 standards. This quality program has been audited by commercial nuclear utilities, NUPIC, and DOE contractors."
Overseas, suppliers for the Navy in the UK like Street Crane Xpress, Babcock and Houlder supply equipment and services for the defence and other sectors.
The equipment they supply is in use on aircraft and helicopter carriers of a type used by national navies in several different countries around the world.
SCX Special Projects, a company within the SCX Group supplying for government and other special projects such as stadium roofs, has recently supplied the HMS Queen Elizabeth and the HMS Prince of Wales, two new Queen Elizabeth Class aircraft carriers that are being finished in early 2013.
It supplied four 3t overhead cranes per ship. It is thought the cranes are used for lifting aircraft parts.
On these systems, SCX Special Projects installed specalised controls systems such as redundancy and inverter controls on the brakes and controls that help to secure the load even when the waves cause the ship and crane to move suddenly. The SCX Special Projects is the sister company of Street Crane. It works in the UK and also exports. SCX also does special or critical lift applications like nuclear, theatrical, and stadium roofing, for example the roofing at Wimbledon Stadium.
With the UK Navy as clients, SCX Special Projects is familiar with handling the shipboard side of Navy crane operations. Lloyds Register, the UK maritime classification society, approves SCX’s designs.
Project manager for SCX Special Projects, Daniel Salthouse explains what features generally are used for navy cranes on ships.
"As it’s on a ship, it obviously has better control than a standard control would have, it has more safety systems. We’ve got additional safety switches and circuits. We use inverter control on all motions and we have additional safety brakes, but the main difference is that it’s a much stronger structure than you would use on an equivalent land based crane."
"You have to work within certain sea conditions so there are limits on movement and you have to allow for the fact that the load can swing. We use rack and pinion to drive it along the rails whereas a normal crane would rely on friction. This means that the crane is held in a controlled position at all times. The hoist itself can lift a anywhere so you have to guide it."
A common feature on a shipboard crane is a rack and pinion drive, Salthouse says, which may be used anywhere a crane has to work on an incline or where there is very strong wind, for example a rooftop application.
Salthouse says, "We’ve done it on the roofs of buildings where we’ve had access equipment working. Nowadays buildings aren’t rectangular and the roofs all tend to be sloping and curved."
Sea state is one of the criteria SCX engineers design for when building a naval crane. Salthouse says, "The ones we’re manufacturing at the moment are for the new aircraft carriers and the design started about 2 years ago. We generally get given a specification and are told what the cranes need to be able to do, for example, what the required lift height and crane coverage are as well as any specific load conditions and what sea state the crane has to be able to operate in." We’ll then review these requirements and discuss the application with the client to ensure that the cranes both meet their requirements and fit within the confines of the ship.
One of Street Crane’s partners in the past has been UK marine design consultancy Houlder. The companies have worked together to supply the UK Navy’s HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion, two 18,500 tonne landing platform dock ships. On the project they supplied electric travelling monorail hoists and gantries. The hoists were rated differently depending on load and safety levels required: 6t SWL for general loads and 4.5 tonne SWL for handling ordnance at sea.
Houlder said the lifting equipment was ammunition rated, and could manoeuvre and quickly load equipment throughout the internal vehicle decks of the ships. After acceptance testing, cranes undergo onboard testing and sea trails.
The hoisting systems were compliant with JSP 467: one of the most stringent standards employed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion are two 18,500t landing platform dock ships.
Another manufacturer in the international defence market is S. Crane Engineering Works of Mumbai. In India, it manufactures cranes and hoists for different government departments like ONGC, BHEL, HPCL, BARC, NPC, NTPC, JNPT, DRDL, Hindustan Aeronautics and Hindustan Pesticides. It also supplies to Qatar Armed Forces.
Among its many projects in India is the Cranes to Railways Central Organization for Modernization of Workshops. Sandeep Sukhija, CEO, S. Crane Engineering works, says, "The crane supplied to COFMOW was of 10 ton capacity with a bridge length of 23.2 meter and lift of 10 meters, this was a High speed crane with a cabin having special features like VVVF Drive, Master Controller, Anti Collusion System, Chain drag system. "
Sukhija says, "COFMOW also has their own set of technical requirements in the tender document called AT. These are to be stringently followed, to have the cranes passed at the design stage and inspection stage. We do follow the standards 807 and 3177 prescribed by Bureau of Indian standard in all Hoists and Cranes. S. Crane also supplies to the Indian Navy, such as cranes used for helicopter maintenance. Sukija says, "Regarding our cranes being used at Defense installation, for Chief Engineer Navy (Military Engineering Services) Vizag we had installed a 2 ton by 50 meter span EOT crane for maintenance of helicopter in the Hangar. At Mazagon Mumbai for Naval Dockyard we have installed a 2 ton, 4 meter radius, 360 degree jib crane for handling material on the ship." Sukhija adds, "The market for Government work is fair. With the type of infrastructure development we are seeing in the recent times there will be a fair demand in the year 2013. Also in order to serve the needs of the vast Indian population demand from the market is bound to get stronger."
The company, founded in 1979, moved in the following decade from service and repairs to full electrical crane manufacture. It has a manufacturing facility at Talasari and in the last two years it has expanded with a JV with a partner in Oman, Omar Trading, and a new Mumbai location.
It exports all over Africa and the Middle East, including in Tanzania, Ghana, Saudi Arabia ,Doha-Qatar, Dubai, Uganda, Oman, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Srilanka
Strong abilities in documentation, financing, as well as understanding the work culture, are essential to success in these markets, says Sukhija,
"The defense contracts are by tender only. We are registered crane manufacturer with the above two agencies. The registering process with these agencies is stringent and requires technical and documental proficiency."
Also in the rail was built, the result of a public private partnership with the UK government’s ministry of transport.
For the UK Navy, Zhenhua Port Machinery Company (ZPMC), based in Shanghai, China sold a goliath crane that will lift 1,000t ship blocks when building the UK Navy’s new aircraft carrier.
The gantry is being put on the new aircraft carrier to lift and place the carrier sub-blocks and components, including upper block, bow block, islands and aircraft lifts, without disrupting the dockside area by the ship.
The semi-erected gantry came to Rosyth, UK in 2011 from China where, over several months, it was erected, tested and commissioned with the help of ZMPC’s partner UK-headquartered engineering consultancy Babcock.
Outlining the need, the UK government published in 2004, entitled ‘The Future of Rail’ and ‘The Future of Transport: A Network for 2030’.
Aimed at easing congestion in commercial traffic at the port the ZPMC rail mounted gantry has replaced some of the port’s aging freight handling equipment and supporting two berths.
Like ZMPC, several public suppliers show that governments buying cranes, while enforcing strict quality standards, are not afraid to source from beyond their borders with demand high as populations grow around the world.
