APPLICATION REPORT | GANTRY CRANES
PURPOSE FIT-FOR-
From a single and double-girder gantry crane to a semi-Goliath and the ‘Tears of Malmo’ – Julian Champkin discovers there’s a lot of benefits to using overhead gantries.
B
efore we begin, we should clear up a point of nomenclature. An overhead crane has a beam- and-trolley arrangement that
runs on rails set at height. A gantry crane, also known as a portal crane or, for large ones a Goliath, has a beam-and-trolley arrangement that is raised up on legs; it is the legs that run on rails (generally), and the rails are on the ground. There is also a hybrid between the two,
an overhead crane at one end and a gantry crane at the other, which has a bit of an identity crisis but is hugely useful and is called a semi-Gantry. Now that that is out of the way, we can proceed.
Gantry cranes come in all sizes. The shape, though, and even the proportions, stay much the same. From the hand- pushed frame on castors that one-man auto-repair outfits use to lift a 250kg engine from a car to the huge behemoths that tower over shipyards and can lift 800 tons or more, they are, as we have said, basically a beam on legs. The design is almost infinitely scalable. Which, in itself, is an indication that it is fit-for-purpose. Andrew Neill, chief engineer of Street
Crane, has been designing gantry cranes for years. “One of their many benefits is that they are economical to build,” he says. “The rails for a standard overhead crane in
a factory or plant have to be supported on the walls of the building or on some kind of steel structure. If you are outside and your overhead crane needs a raised-up structure for 300 metres of running, that adds up to an awful lot of steel,” he says. “But a gantry crane doesn’t need a building or a structure. You just need a couple of legs at each end of the beam and they can run along the floor. In raw materials alone that is a saving. It’s a massive reduction in the resources you are using. “It also means that wherever the crane
can run you have nothing to get in the way of other operations that you might be carrying out. For any customer who
R A gantry and a semi-gantry, both by Street Crane, working together at Hinkley Point nuclear power station.
www.hoistmagazine.com | March 2022 | 29
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77
