BATTERY POWER Ӏ TECHNOLOGY


select takes delivery of first three Liebherr lr1160.1 unplugged cranes Liebherr’s LR 1160.1 unplugged is the latest model in its battery powered crawler crane series. Select Plant Hire in the UK has taken delivery of the first three models and plans to take delivery of three more later this year. For more information about the crane see Stuart Anderson’s crawler crane feature in our April 2022 issue: https://bit.ly/3LvdezG or our online news story here: https://bit.ly/3G70T3G


has been charging and discharging. “Most people know not to let lead-acid batteries discharge to a level less than 10% of their maximum charge, but you should not charge it to more than around 80% either. And battery life is limited by the number of charging cycles; on a lead-acid battery a small charge session, from say 50% to 60% has the same effect on battery life as a long charge from 10% to 80%; so you should do fewer, longer charges rather than many shorter ones.” (Lithium ion batteries are not subject to this.) “Our sensors and algorithm can process all this data and send it wirelessly to a screen on the crane or in the office.” Dan Hunt is executive sales


manager for Shield Batteries: their batteries power, among other things, the booms of tower cranes. “Lead-acid batteries of course are heavy; but that is actually an advantage in cranes because you can use it as counterweight; why carry lumps of concrete around when you can carry your power source instead? Lithium-ion at present costs around five times as much as a similar-capacity lead


acid battery; so many people are content for now to stick to lead- acid.” And the technology has improved: these are not the acid- leaking things that start your car (or go flat on cold mornings and refuse to start it.) “These are AGM batteries, standing for Absorbed Glass Mat: the plates are separated by a glassfibre material that holds the sulphuric acid like a sponge, so there is no liquid sloshing around; they will not leak and you can lay these batteries on their sides and they will carry on working. Good maintenance will prolong their life: we have batteries that are six, seven or eight years old and that are still working well.” If you still believe that batteries


are low-power and go flat quickly, listen to Dan Ezzatvar, marketing and special products director for lifting specialists GGR. “We’ve been selling, renting and operating electric mini-cranes for twenty years, and our feed-back to the manufacturers has helped shaped their design. The three questions that every customer asks me are ‘ how long does the battery last?’; ‘how fast is it to charge?’; and ‘What is the power consumption


and output?’ The fact is that we have battery technology that now enables those machines to work for ten hours continuously – and that is continuously, without stops for operators’ coffee-breaks. We have fast charging systems from three-phase supplies; and technology is delivering more power from batteries of the same physical size. So we have new batteries, from Faresin Industries S.p.a, that deliver 330Ah – which is 10% up from the previous model’s 300ah; 440Ah – again 10% up from the previous 400ah; and the massive 560Ah battery with run times of up to 20 hours, charge times of under four hours and 44.8 kw/h consumption. And they are powering our F6.26 telehandler which can lift 2.6 tonnes at a reach of 6 metres. Customers wanting to move away from diesel imagine that batteries can power small, low-capacity machines only, and that bigger lifts will need hydrogen or some other alternative power. But they are wrong: the cut-off transition point is a lot higher than they think. Battery-power for larger lifts is a mature technology. It is here on the market today.”


CRANES TODAY 35


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