FEATURE | GANTRY CRANES
GANTRIES GREAT AND SMALL
Gantry cranes come in all shapes and sizes.
Correction: Gantry cranes come in all sizes. The shapes, however, are all the same. Julian Champkin reports.
T
he highest-capacity crane in the world is a gantry crane. It is the Taisun crane at the Yantai Raffles shipyard in Shandong
province in China. It has lifted and has a safe working load of 20,133 tons. Such ultra- high-capacity cranes are commonly called Goliath cranes and have a traditional and current use in shipbuilding. Next down in size can be gantries used
as process cranes, the ones that feed incoming materials – logs, scrap steel
and the like – from a stockyard into a factory or power plant. Frequently they are automated, since the work is largely repetitious and predictable; frequently also the crane works both outdoors and indoors: it runs on rails that go from the open-air yard into the covered building. Nomenclature becomes tricky here and remains so. Such cranes are also called portal cranes – the portal being the large empty space spanned by the gantry beam - but they are all gantry designs.
The Tasun crane in Yantai, China, setting a world record for the heaviest lift, of 20,133 tons
Intermodal use, as in transferring containers from rail to trucks, is another typical application for the larger sizes of gantry crane. Ports have their own types: RTGs, rubber-tyred gantry cranes, and RMTGs, rail-mounted gantry cranes, are standard equipment and even the ship- to-shore cranes that load and unload giant container ships are commonly called gantries, though they probably should not be since their design and load-bearing paths are very different. We shall in this article leave such dockyard evolutions of the theme aside. Still further down the scale midsize
gantry cranes are found in fabrication plants and factories; and ultra-small man- powered ones, pushed into position and with manual chain hoists running along the beam are ubiquitous in automobile repair shops and the like, where they are ideal for lifting engines from vehicles and indeed for any load that is a bit too heavy for one man to handle. So, we are talking multitudes here – multiple sizes, multiple applications, multiple environments, but all sharing a common basic design. First, some definitions: what exactly is a
gantry crane? It is, speaking strictly, clear enough: it is a beam that is supported on legs at each end. A hoist can move along the beam; and the legs can move along the ground. Coverage is therefore rectangular; and the load can be moved with simplicity in all three dimensions. But nothing is ever quite as clear as it seems. Some users, some manufacturers even, use the terms ‘gantry crane, ‘bridge crane’, ‘girder crane’ and ‘overhead crane’ interchangeably. New Jersey-based
24 | March 2025 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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