MONORAIL CRANES
Across the industry there is a growing demand for efficient material handling solutions – particularly in the manufacturing, automotive and logistics sector. Monorail cranes, known for their space-saving design and flexibility, are answering this call with the integration of automation technology. Julian Champkin investigates.
A
utomation is everywhere. Digitalisation can control everything. AI is taking over the tasks that clever human
beings used to do. The driverless car is with us, and the workerless factory cannot be far behind. But what of the cranes in those factories? Cranes, of course, have been automated to one degree or another for many years. Process cranes, foundry cranes, and waste-to-energy cranes come with automation as standard these days. The staff who control them can sit in a comfortable and clean office, some distance from the action, monitoring the crane’s performance on multiple screens and intervening only when some change of output is desired. Such cranes do tend to be at the heavier, high-capacity – and high investment – end of lifting machinery: they are big and expensive bits of kit where the capital expenditure of installing perhaps complex automation can easily be justified. What, though, of the other end of the lifting
market? Is it not time that light cranes too – the ubiquitous overhead monorail – become automated as well?
Monorails and their offspring – the light overhead bridge crane made up of monorail sections and profiles, which can integrate smoothly with standard monorails – are abundant in manufacturing plants, large and small, all over the world. Since automation is now becoming almost ridiculously inexpensive, components are available almost off the shelf, and
smartphones and tablets that can control the ensuing systems are owned by almost everyone. Should it not now be applied to the monorail?
It would seem so. The global overhead monorail crane system market is valued at approximately $1.2bn in 2025 and is projected to experience robust growth. Automation and efficiency improvements – in logistics as well as in manufacturing – are reported to be primary drivers; businesses, as ever, seek to optimise material handling processes and reduce labour costs. Even unautomated, the monorail more
than repays its installation. It transports parts between workstations with minimal use of floor space; it gives continuous movement of parts, reducing bottlenecks in automated lines; it can feed parts into robotic cells or CNC machines; and its ergonomics can save human operators from the strains of manual lifting that can lead to back pains or worse. We can split overhead monorails into those that have a hoist mounted on the trolley and those where the trolley supports a fixed length chain. The latter, of course, move the loads horizontally around the factory, but do not lift it up and down, and are often distinguished as ‘conveyors’. Both have their uses and, on both, the trolley can be motorised or manually operated. In the latter, the operator takes hold of the load or the empty hook, walks along with it to the desired location and the trolley follows him.
Is this really necessary? So, why automate it? “There is a kind of misconception that automation is going to kill everything that is manual. But the two can work hand-in-hand, and that can give more efficiency than trying to automate every element when not necessarily every element of the process needs to be automated,” explains Dan Upton, who is managing director of Niko UK alongside his brother Sam Upton; the company is a subsidiary of leading European manufacturers Helm Hellas. The Niko range includes overhead monorails and light bridge cranes, with a speciality in low headroom lifting. The case put forward by the brothers is that there are many places where light overhead monorails could and should be automated – and that there are many places where perhaps they should not. “Very briefly, if you’ve got, say, a conveyor
A motorised steel bridge system.
belt system or a robotic system that’s continuously moving, then trying to unload that or load it with a powered crane isn’t very safe unless you can actually stop the conveyor. That’s because you either have to get the crane moving at the same speed as the conveyor, or else you have to stop the conveyor then start it again – and a continuously repeated stop-start is not efficient. Add to that you will want to keep the lifting chain vertical, for safety: you don’t want it to drag either behind the trolley or ahead of it as it lifts the load from the conveyor.” If you do, you will get potentially dangerous swaying. Achieving the required automated speed synchronisation or a repeated stop-start is quite complex. “Whereas if you have a manual solution, with the overhead crane unpowered and able to roll freely, then as the operator moves the hook and connects it to the load, the free- wheeling trolley always follows the hook and stays almost directly over it. It is an easy thing for the operator to do if the conveyor is not moving too fast, and the chain is never at an angle. So stop-start and sway are issues that have been avoided,” explains Dan Upton. There is a place for automated light cranes, he continues, with an option to go semi- automatic by automating sections of the route – such as taking the load to a specific section where you can stop it for a set amount of time or move it at a constant speed before going manually through buffering zones, storage
32 | September 2025 |
www.hoistmagazine.com
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