NOVEMBER 2022 Ӏ TECHNOLOGY REPORT


Chapel-en-le-Frith, installed the cranes for the Testbed 80. To lift jet engines into position they put in two 8t underslung cranes with two ZX monorail hoists on the same track. Tight space constraints and feedback to the building control system made the installation particularly challenging says Mark Hadfield, marketing manager, Sreet Crane. Because of the tight headroom in the test cell there was no room to use a traditional mobile crane, so it used a Megalift Jacking System with four giant hydraulic jacks instead. The data systems inside Testbed


j with around 134,000 employees


and an annual turnover of over 230 billion DKK. Even though ZF no longer


manufactures gears for airships it still supplies them for the aviation industry as well as for road vehicles. Its Danish subsidiary ZF Danmark has two factories, for which Finnish light crane systems and jib cranes manufacturer Erikkila supplied lifting equipment to speed up production. Both use solutions from crane supplier and expert Fyns Kran Udstyr. The workshops handle many


different products, which vary significantly in weight and shape. A problem for the company was that the capacity of its earlier workstations was not being used effectively. It was solved by integrating the existing cranes with two new column-mounted cranes from Kito Erikkila. There are six workstations, and the heavy gearboxes can now easily be moved between them and handled with the nearest column-mounted crane. “We have achieved a much more efficient workflow while creating a better working environment for our employees. We are very satisfied with the solution,” says ZF Danmark service manager Thomas Aagaard.


146 CRANES TODAY


Rolls-Royce is as famous an aviation name as Zeppelin. Its Trent turbofan jet engines power the Airbus A330, A340, A350, and A380, as well as the Boeing 777 and 787 Dreamliner. Last year Rolls-Royce successfully completed the first engine run at its new £90 million Testbed 80 in Derby, which is now the largest - and smartest - indoor aerospace testbed installation in the world. A Rolls-Royce Trent XWB jet engine was lifted into place, run, and monitored, marking a major milestone on the project which has been under construction for almost three years. The covered testbed has an


internal area of 7,500m2, making it larger than a football pitch. (The building has to be large, since it is running jet engines at full power inside.) It has been designed to test not only today’s engines but also Rolls-Royce’s UltraFan demonstrator, which is its blueprint for the next generation of ultra-efficient engines, as well as the hybrid or all-electric systems which are hoped to power flights of the future. It can accommodate engines of all sizes up to 155klbf thrust, - which would be enough to launch a Boeing 747 with just one huge engine. Street Crane, based at nearby


The new crane in the NASA Operations Checkout building, with the old crane beside it


80 deliver data from more than 10,000 different parameters on an engine; an intricate web of sensors detect even the tiniest vibrations at a rate of up to 200,000 samples per second. The testbed is also home to a powerful X-ray machine that can capture 30 images per second and beam them directly to a secure cloud where engineers around the world can analyse them. Rolls-Royce is the only engine manufacturer in the world to X-ray its engines while they are running. The walls of Testbed 80 are thick enough to contain the X-rays, which are so powerful they could otherwise X-ray a person standing six miles away. Street Crane has been supplying


the aerospace sector for over 70 years, with BAE Systems, Virgin Atlantic, and Bristow among recent customers. It has supplied cranes with single spans of more than 50 metres, multi-span cranes of more than 100 metres, and twin hoists with power slewing in unison. Secondary braking and load arrestors, overspeed protection and micro-speeds and infinitely variable speeds are standard for the sector. The complexities of aerospace engineering are immense. Cranes and hoists for them are simpler, but still have more than enough satisfying challenges.


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