China’s three largest manufacturers of construction equipment – Sany, Zoomlion and XCMG – are locked in a battle to record the heaviest crawler crane lifts, in a contest that is a mix of application requirements and prestige.
China has a number of nuclear power plants under construction across the country, which require heavy lifts, while there is also demand for large hoists in its petrochemicals industry and other applications.
Following on from last year’s Bauma China in Shanghai, where Sany displayed its monster SCC86000TM, 3,600-tonne crawler crane, XCMG announced a world record for its 4000-tonne crawler crane, after it completed a 4500-tonne overload test.
The XGC88000, which can move and rotate when it is loaded with up to 2,500 tonnes weight, has a design favoured by Chinese manufacturers for large size crawler cranes – a twin-arm main boom.
This compares with Liebherr’s LR13000 crawler, designed with a single arm boom in its heaviest lift configuration, which, with a max lifting capacity of 3,000 tonnes at 12m, Liebherr describes as “the most powerful crawler crane in the world of conventional design”.
In April this year in Beijing, Zoomlion held a conference where its 3,200 tonne ZCC3200NP crawler crane was awarded a large tonnage crawler cranes special equipment manufacturing license and test certificate, by China’s National Construction Machinery Quality Supervision and Inspection Centre.
This followed on from testing of its 82,000 tonne-metres crane, including overloading to 4000t, and 16 hours continuous operation. Special attention was paid to the endurance of the steel structure, weld inspection, and safety monitoring system, said the company.
According to Zoomlion, the company became the first domestic manufacturer with a more than 3000-tonne crawler crane manufacturing enterprise license, allowing it to sell its very large tonnage crawler cranes overseas.
But outside of the debugging sites of course it is the smaller crawlers that see more frequent lifts. In January, Sany’s SCC16000 lifted 950.5 tonnes in an operation in to install an absorption tower, in a project which belongs to Sinopec’s Maoming Company. The 22C001 absorption tower is t he heaviest and highest equipment in the coal-based hydrogen plant.
According to Sany, the max lift 1,600 tonnes crane has been used in the hoisting of the dome of nuclear power plants for 17 times, as well as China’s first 6MW wind turbine.
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